The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part II of a Series.

Avengers: Infinity War opened to a new box office record this weekend, taking in $250 million domestically and narrowly edging out the previous record holder, Star Wars: The Force Awakes. As Box Office Mojo put it, “Audiences assembled.”

There’s no doubt about it: MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENTS rake in the cash.

It wasn’t always the case.

In Part I of this series, I explored the concept of the “shared universe” that underlies the crossover event. In this part I’ll give some history of these events themselves, and show how we got to this record-breaking weekend.

What TV and movie producers have been experimenting with since the late 60’s, comic book creators have been doing routinely since the 1940’s, when the Human Torch fought the Submariner.

What's better than a title bout between two characters? A team composed of a bunch of their most popular characters, like the All-Star Game in baseball.

Comic book fans quickly became accustomed to characters from different stories sharing the same fictional universe in a way that was seemingly rare in other mediums. Publishers had characters interact for walk-on cameos, team ups, or fist fights. Unlike in TV and movies, crossovers are logistically very easy for comic book publishers because adding new characters is just ink on paper. As long as a publishing house has the rights to two or more characters, they just have the artist of book A draw in characters from book B. And because a character’s creator wasn’t owed royalties for much of comic publishing history, popular characters could be used throughout a publisher’s line of books to help launch new titles and tell “epic stories.”

By the 1980’s larger crossover events became more and more frequent. By the early aughts it was expected that every year the Big Two publishers DC and Marvel would each feature at least one annual event to get as many characters together as possible. These events would take over many or even the majority of their books for one or several months like Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Infinity Gauntlet, and The House of M, just to name a few.

But translating this concept to the mediums of film and TV has its difficulties because it introduces all the challenges of working with the flesh and blood actors, production staff, and physical logistics of two or more productions. Even a quick walk-on cameo by a character from a different story must be squared away with that actor’s contract, pay requirements, and schedule. Telling a story across the multiple time slots of different series requires the collaboration of all the production teams.

Despite these obstacles, producers wished to build upon brand names, repeat successful formulas, boost the ratings of their series, and hopefully somewhere in there tell great stories. There had been attempts to make comic book crossover projects in the 1980’s: a Supergirl movie spun off from the Christopher Reeve Superman films, a Mighty Thor pilot spinoff from the popular Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series, but nothing ever stuck. It seemed movie and TV audiences would only put up with these garish comic book characters in fits and bursts, not long enough to sustain the “shared universes” comic book fans had come to know. It wasn’t until Marvel Studios painstakingly set up its 2012 Avengers crossover with four years’ of Easter eggs spread across its Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America franchises, that the crossover event hit blockbuster status on the big screen.

Since then, other companies have been trying to ride Marvel’s coattails (now Disney/Marvel) or copy its formula with varying degrees of success.

Sony has a sort of joint custody agreement with Disney/Marvel for the use of Spider-man and is basically leasing space in the Marvel universe after it failed to launch a fully self-sustaining Spider-man franchise of its own.

20th Century Fox, the other inheritor to Marvel IP characters, had been pushing its licensing agreement as far as possible to maintain films (The X-Men series and Deadpool) and TV projects (Gifted, Legion, and New Mutants) in the shared universe based on mutants. At the time of this writing, with Marvel’s parent company Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox, it's unclear if these stories or future projects will also be folded into the established Disney/Marvel Universe.

Their “Distinguished Competition,” DC Comics (the comic publishing subsidiary over at Warner Brothers) is undergoing drastic course correction after is superhero projects as planned out by Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan failed to soar (with the notable exception of Wonder Woman). Although things aren’t all bad for DC/Warner Brothers on the Crossover front. By building a shared universe for some of their TV series (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow, currently all airing on their network, The CW), crossovers between two or all of the shows have gone over pretty well with their fans, becoming regular events as they have been in the comics.

But back in the world of comics where all these colorful characters sprang from, things might not be going so well. I’ll address the phenomenon of “Event Fatigue” in Part III of this series.

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.