Part I of a Series.
In 2008, patient moviegoers who waited until after the credits rolled on the new superhero action comedy Iron Man were rewarded with a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson in an eye patch insinuating that he wanted to recruit Tony Stark into something called the “Avengers Initiative.”
It was a nice little Easter egg for comic book fans, a character they would know as Nick Fury, head of the fictional SHIELD intelligence/military organization, played by an actor wider audiences would recognize, seemingly joking, “Hey, maybe someday they’ll be a team of these superhero people.”
The writers could have left it as a nice little joke. Comic book fans were used to seeing these dropped into those rare comic book movies we got “back then.” Yeah sure Val Kilmer’s Batman might name drop Superman’s Metropolis, but nobody really expected them to meet up in a movie like they would in a comic book or a Saturday morning cartoon.
But then, in that same watershed year of 2008, Tony Stark had a cameo at the end of the Incredible Hulk film, dropping hints that “something” was being built.
These scenes turned out not to be little jokes for comic book fans, but promises. This time Marvel had creative control and a knack for creating films that kept audiences coming back for more. Each Marvel Movie was a piece of a shared universe building to a big crossover event. And after four years of blockbuster hits, that promise was kept with Avengers.
Marvel and its new parent company Disney had seemingly pulled off the impossible, not only launching and sustaining a string of hits that weren’t ashamed to be comic book movies, but translating another comic book institution to the big screen...THE MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENT.
Regardless of whether Thanos succeeds or fails, it’s clear that Disney’s own collection of powerful artifacts—its string of blockbuster superhero movies—has granted it control over the forces of cinematic reality.
To mark this weekend’s release of Infinity War, I want to delve into the concepts of shared universes and crossover events more deeply. In this part, I’ll explain what I mean by a shared universe. In Part II, I’ll cover the history of shared universes in movies, comics, and TV, and then in Part III, I’ll deal with the phenomenon of EVENT FATIGUE and touch on the future of crossover events.
What is a Shared Universe?
You and I, dear readers, are part of reality and thus we share one universe. Even as our individual biographies and outlooks differ we ultimately share certain commonalities. But when we read fiction, more often than not we are peering into separate universes, each with its own established themes, characters, and rules. To preserve genre conventions and authorial intent, the characters of a Jane Austen novel you finished last week aren’t going to wander into the courtroom of your John Grisham legal thriller you are thumbing through today. The exception that proves the rule however is the shared universe, when the book you read today, offers a different story and perspective set in the same world as the book you read last week.
A shared universe is when a creator or creators establish that fictional characters of separate stories inhabit the same world. This is different than simply sequels which follow or connect narratives from the same group of characters into what is hopefully a larger narrative. For example Agatha Christie wrote many stories about clever detectives solving murders involving eccentric affluent suspects in opulent settings like country manors or resorts in exotic locales. While some of her books follow the same characters like Ms. Marple or Hercule Poirot at different points in their respective lives, other books establish that all these detectives are in the same world. They have overlapping social circles with common acquaintances and even meet from time to time. And it could be argued that these multiple perspectives give a certain verisimilitude to her fictional world; it establishes that the world she created is not centered around an English spinster or an OCD Belgian, they are just two (of many) windows into a wider word.
A Shared Universe might be fairly simple way for one prose author to connect narratives that aren’t direct sequels, since they can drop names, allusions or even cameos of characters from previous work. Stephen King has been quite fond of this over the course of his career, featuring everything from casual allusions to shared landmarks like the Overlook Hotel or Shawshank Prison to his Dark Tower Saga, outright stating many of the supernatural elements in other works are linked to the same set of interdimensional beings intersecting with different parallel realities.
Coming up in Part II: The Shared Universe in comics, movies, and TV.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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