Once upon a time, every new superhero movie seemed to exist in (not-so) splendid isolation. Michael Keaton’s Batman never met Christopher Reeve’s Superman, despite the cities of Gotham and Metropolis being situated less than 300 miles apart in many DC comic book tales. When Sony’s Spider-Man found himself under threat from the likes of the Green Goblin, Doc Ock and even a nefarious Symbiote in the early to mid-noughties Tobey Maguire films, he did not dial up Iron Man or send an email into space for the attention of one Thor Odinson of Asgard – because those characters were inconveniently owned by someone else. Only in the comics was Ant-Man likely to bump into the Hulk, or Mister Fantastic make the acquaintance of Captain America. Until more than a decade into the 21st-century, big screen superheroes existed like spandex-sporting Robinson Crusoes destined never to meet their Man Fridays.
It was Marvel Studios, beginning with 2012’s The Avengers, that popularised a brave new world of interconnected superheroes who could pop up over and over again in different movies, usually portrayed by the same actors. The Marvel Cinematic Universe broke all the rules of superhero film-making, and made us wonder why anyone ever had them. Suddenly, heroes and villains were capable of extended, multiple episode character arcs that added a richness and realism to proceedings that had rarely been seen before. Iron Man might just have invented time travel, but on a psychoanalytic level he felt like a real person capable of genuine human emotions, soaring success, abject failure … ahem, casual sexism … and everything in between. Each new superhero to emerge fully formed into the Marvel multiverse felt intelligently connected to all the others, ripples in the fabric of reality in one corner of the multiversal web somehow affecting matters somewhere else entirely in unexpected ways (at least until the more recent, weaker films).
