Why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Perennially Appealing

A Holiday Miracle?

Over the past four years, few sectors of the economy have suffered more than the film industry and movie theaters, in particular. As a consequence of increasing numbers of streaming services, movie theater box office receipts were already in decline before the pandemic struck. Then in 2020 with the pandemic’s emergence those receipts reached a forty-year low, down 80% from 2019. This past year showed some improvement for moviemakers and cinemas, but then came Omicron, which has proven, by far, the most transmissible variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus yet.

In the face of these dire circumstances, though, the week before Christmas brought a holiday miracle. The latest addition to what has come to be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was released. From the outset, Spider-Man: No Way Home has registered near record-breaking results. The box office take for its preview was third all-time. For its opening night, it ranked the best ever with the Cinemark Theaters chain, and over its first weekend, it attracted more than twenty million viewers to theaters even in the face of skyrocketing Omicron rates. That twenty million represented 90% of movie customers across North America. The film’s three-week total ranked a lucrative tenth best ever in North America.

Forever Appealing

Spider-Man: No Way Home was shown to 62% of the seats in American movie theaters. Both this and the movie’s success in these terrible times constitute evidence for Martin Scorsese’s lament that such franchise pictures are crowding out filmmaking pursued as an art form – what Scorsese calls “cinema,” as opposed to simple audiovisual entertainment.

These patterns also corroborate my own account in an earlier post concerning the MCU’s world-wide appeal. There I argued that MCU movies exploit one of the same cultural attractors that religions evolved toward long ago, namely, superhuman agents who possess minimally counterintuitive properties. Such cultural representations possess decisive cognitive advantages. They are, in short, attention grabbing, highly memorable, and inferentially rich. These traits make such representations lasting.

Complementary Accounts

In his engaging new book, Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Michael D. Nichols advances an elaborate account of the MCU movies’ appeal. He argues that the nearly two dozen MCU movies all exhibit one or another of six standard forms from religious myths:

(1) rites of passage and initiation

(2) confronting villains who exhibit a hero’s darker, shadow self

(3) managing impurity or pollution

(4) intrafamilial violence

(5) being stalked by death (the MCU’s Thanos)

(6) quests to the underworld or the past (for example, the MCU’s Time

Heist) for a final battle with death

Nichols provides myriad illustrations of these patterns from the many MCU films and from the myths of the world’s religions. Following familiar interpretive paths in religious studies, Nichols maintains that such forms both in the MCU movies and in religions’ myths constitute classic narratives that depict recurrent themes in human experience.

The two accounts on offer here are not only not inconsistent with one another, they are complementary. The cognitive science of religions provides ample resources for explaining, first, why humans recognize such patterns in the first place, second, why the resulting themes take narrative forms, and, third, why the results constitute classic narratives. In short, all three turn on the kind of mind Homo sapiens possesses. Their complementarity nicely illustrates the ways that interpretive projects in the humanities and explanatory proposals in cognitive science can be mutually enriching.