How The Avengers Impacted Media

The night before ‘The Avengers’ release, thousands of fans waiting to see what these five movies built up to and if it lived up to their expectations. With an overwhelming positive response from both professional critics, long time fans and most importantly (to the studio) the mainstream audience, this positive review and good word made The Avengers become the 5th highest grossing film of all-time (excluding inflation) grossing over 1.5 billion dollars.
This was an idea laughed at by many studios, but now we look today and see that Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing film franchise ever, grossing almost 11 billion dollars worldwide, quite an achievement and no one can deny that, an idea laughed at by other studios, journalists, critics and even some fans to save the company from bankruptcy became the highest grossing film franchise of all time.
So it is no surprise that this impacted the film industry as a whole, and it certainly did. One reason I decided to do this is because of the latest trailer for The Mummy (https://youtu.be/IjHgzkQM2Sg) which will be apart of a franchise of monsters (not sure how it will work tbh) but anyhow like Marvel, they are doing solo movies to lead up to a big crossover movie, many other studios are also doing this now, DC is having a go at doing their own cinematic universe, despite what many people think, out of the many franchises trying to ‘copy’ Marvel’s method, arguably DC is the one doing the most successful out of these ‘copycats’ (excluding Star Wars since Rogue One isn’t out yet at the time of writing).
One franchise that tried to make a cinematic universe (and apparently still will according to reports) is Sony’s Ghostbusters 2016. A film that was meant to be a stepping off point for future spinoff films set in the Ghostbusters universe was unfortunately set to fail after its tremendously terrible trailers and marketing campaign. Despite that it received good reviews, it unfortunately failed at the box office earning only 230 million dollars with an budget of approximately 150 million dollars (excluding marketing). Personally in my opinion, Ghostbusters 2016 was an good movie with good pacing, editing, acting etc but did lack a lot of things and was quite disappointing.
Anyhow that was an example as well as The Amazing Spider Man series produced by Sony (coincidence? I think not), the first movie was a good movie and is actually quite underrated in my opinion but then The Amazing Spider-Man 2 showed Sony’s true colours for the webslinger as well the leaked emails from the Sony hack showing that Sony wanted to make multiple spinoff films to the Spider-Man franchise including Sinster Six (which in fact had Drew Goddard involved and was meant to be released a couple of weeks ago, an Venom solo movie (apparently still in development) and even an Aunt May solo movie!?! (sadly cancelled). Again due to fan outcry and weak box office numbers, Sony in fact made a deal with Marvel to work on Spider-Man together with Spider-Man Homecoming set to launch in Summer 2017.
As for TV, The Avengers did have some impact for crossovers on television, an example of this is the Flash and Arrow crossovers that take place normally on the 8th episode of each season, since Season 3 of Arrow and Season 1 of The Flash (with Legends and Supergirl recently joining this DCTV universe). I doubt there is an argument that these crossovers would not have likely happened without The Avengers success showing that crossovers can work in live action if they are built up to them. With the latest 4-night crossover, I think it’s fair to say that DC knows how to do crossovers well on TV.
As well as this, Marvel is planning to release The Defenders next year that will see the shows Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and possibly The Punisher all crossover in an Avengers-esque event story. Again, this was clearly done by Marvel because of The Avengers’ success so they had to replicate that in the television format and I’m sure that it’s safe to say that Marvel Netflix is doing spectacular at the moment.
In conclusion, I believe that The Avengers has shown that if you build up to a gigantic crossover event and build a large universe, it will pay off and save you from bankruptcy. However in order to do this, the studio must not rush the production of this cinematic universe (DCEU) or force out a cinematic universe from a franchise that doesn’t have enough content to make spinoff films on (Ghostbusters). In the end though, there is no doubt at all that The Avengers has impacted media ever since that opening night after the credits rolled and the fans rejoiced and cried in joy that the effort of sticking watching these films from Iron Man (2008) had paid off with them all teaming up now in the movie that changed media forever.