by Jacyn Dawes
Marvel hit a home run with their newest release of Avengers: Endgame. It made nearly one million dollars more than their previous highest-grossing movie, Avengers: Infinity War, in the opening weekend. This is impressive considering speculation about Disney increasing their movie releases from one or two a year to a whopping three a year since 2017. While it is too soon to suggest that the law of diminishing marginal returns is taking effect on solo character movies, where the first is valued highly but that value decreases with each additional movie, it is clear that the collaboration movies like Avengers: Endgame, are seeing huge successes from this risk.
Now that Disney has bought out Fox, hopefully they will be able to work some of their magic on the X-Men series. Dark Phoenix came to theaters on June 6th, with a disappointing opening weekend. Fox released the first X-Men movie back in July of 2000. Since then, they have released twelve movies. Fox definitely had the jump on the superhero scene compared to the Avenger series which began in 2008 with The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. Yet Disney has now released twenty-two movies and has had more consistent success. Many of our favorite heroes and actors are from X-Men, like Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine. And the storylines all originated with Marvel. It raises the question, why was Disney able to do consistently better than Fox?
One idea is the use of story lines on solo character movies. Disney released five solo character movies before the first collaboration movie, Avengers, came out in 2012. They had built up the characters in their own movies before bringing them together, causing people to already know and like (or in some cases dislike) those characters beforehand. Disney also dropped key pieces of information into each movie in preparation for a larger storyline. This caused a lot of binge watching for movie fans before big releases like Avengers: Endgame. Alamo Drafthouse and AMC were just a few of many theaters who put on a sixty-hour movie marathon featuring all 22 movies. These marathons started on Tuesday afternoon and finished with the release of Avengers: Endgame on Thursday night. Their ability to fill seats despite taking place during the week shows the true marvel of this franchise.
Fox, it seems, went in the opposite direction of Disney. They released five collaboration movies before they released their first solo character movie in 2013. The idea may have been that X-Men is a team-based series, but when you look at the top five movies in the franchise, you would notice that three of them are character solo movies including Logan, Deadpool and Deadpool 2. There are many fans who do enjoy the characters, hopefully Disney will be able to make them each shine before giving it another go around.
Fox has not been able to pull off an overarching storyline for the series. For Avengers: Endgame, each of the previous movies (we will let Incredible Hulk off the hook a bit for this one) came to play an important role in the finale. It seems like Fox chose to stick with a consistent Professor Xavier versus Magento story line, and the solo character movies did not come into play at all. Disney has a long way to go with bringing X-Men back into the light, but it seems like they have learned a lot from their successes, and yes, some failures, during their run with the Avengers franchise.
Jacyn Dawes is a Graduate Assistant at the Gwartney Institute and an MBA student at Ottawa University
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