What can Businesses Learn from Comic Book Movies?

I would not classify myself as a legitimate pop culture nerd, but I do enjoy a good comic book movie. I know Martin Scorsese might disagree, but I will admit that I find myself watching?Blade?or?Watchmen or one of the many?Batman movies on the plane as often as?The King of Comedy?or?Bringing Out the Dead.

That said, it has been interesting, from a business perspective, to follow Disney’s?Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, over the past several years. It has indeed been a collection of business case studies, but I would characterize most of them as cautionary tales.

What set this off? It was the latest release from the?Marvel Cinematic Universe?that got me thinking about it.?Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3?was released to theaters just recently, and the movie underachieved at the box office, at least on its opening week.?It underperformed when compared to its original projections and to its predecessor,?Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.?These disappointing results, coupled with similarly disappointing films as of late from the same studio, got me thinking - how could a box office juggernaut run out of momentum in this manner?

For some context, Marvel has been making an interconnected series of movies for more than 10 years - a cinematic universe filled with sequels, crossovers, prequels and team-ups. Everyone has their favorite movie - myself, I am rather fond of the first?Iron Man?movie, but?Captain America: Civil War?also has a warm spot in my heart. The MCU’s third phase of films culminated with its two-part epic:?Avengers: Infinity War?and?Avengers: Endgame. The two films produced nearly a combined $5 billion in revenue. From a business standpoint, this clearly was the apogee.

If the culmination of Phase 3’s?Infinity Saga?was the peak, the subsequent films were clearly a trip down the leeward slope, if not an outright fall over the proverbial precipice. The movies that followed?Endgame?increasingly underwhelmed at the box office. Mind you, this coincided with the Covid pandemic, which was used at the time as an explanation, if not an excuse. 2021 was an especially painful year - Black Widow?failed to clear $400 million. It was followed by?Shang-Chi, which did modestly better, generating around $430 million in revenue, and it was followed by?The Eternals, which barely surpassed the $400 million mark. For a studio accustomed to films approaching and exceeding $1 billion in theatre revenue, this was disappointing, bordering on disastrous.?

And then, at the close of 2021, Sony of all companies teamed up with Disney-Marvel to produce?Spider-Man: No Way Home, which crushed the theatres, generating close to $2 billion in box office revenue, all at the height of the Omicron variant. That is, it generated more revenue than the prior three films combined! Worse still, and forget about?Spiderman?for a second - even Sony's?Venom: Let There Be Carnage?- an objectively terrible movie - somehow managed to clear $500 million, outperforming Marvel's trifecta of duds that were released at the same time.

This raised significant questions about the existing narrative: was it Covid, or was it the quality of the films themselves that led to such abysmal box office results and unprofitable fiscal periods for Disney? How was Sony able to spearhead profitable movies at the same time that Disney-Marvel was unable to cover the costs to make and market their own films??

Now that we are out of the pandemic, things have not substantially improved. Since?Spiderman, no single Marvel-related movie has cracked the billion-dollar mark.?Doctor Strange?came close, riding?Spiderman’s coattails, but it left a bad taste in many viewers mouths in terms of its quality. Thereafter, Thor: Love and Thunder?struggled to top its previous installment and garnered the ire of both critics and fans alike.?Soon after,?Black Panther: Wakanda Forever?similarly failed to generate the hype and the revenue of its previous Black Panther film. The common theme between the Thor and Black Panther films was this: they were profitable, but not as profitable as their predecessors - they cost more to make and generated less box office revenue. Costs up, sales down: not a good combination for any suit behind a desk.

Black Panther was followed by?Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantomania. This was a genuine disaster. No excuses.?No pandemic - just a terrible movie that everyone hated, that cost a bundle, and failed to make $500 million at the theaters.?It was skewered by critics, loathed by fans, and lost money. Worse still, it failed to set the stage for the next film:?Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

A quick note on serialized cinema trends: when a movie in a cinematic franchise is both financially-successful and much-loved, it frequently sets the stage for the next film.?For example, Captain America: Civil War?set the stage for?Black Panther,?which bolstered?Infinity War, which in turn boosted?Captain Marvel, and so on. As noted already,?Spiderman: No Way Home?hoisted the box office results of the otherwise lackluster?Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.?Things trend.

One can argue that the same phenomenon occurs in inverse -?Guardians?followed a trail of films, where the best cases floundered and the worst cased bombed. And on the heels of a veritable dumpster fire in?Ant-Man,?Guardians?was trying to cross a bridge that had been repeatedly burned by its predecessors. Or better yet, its audience - the folks who would have crossed that bridge to get into the theaters, stared at the charred crossing, and many opted to stay home. That is, by the time the film came around, the fans' good will had been spent, leading to a movie that will make some money, but will not be considered by anyone to be a roaring success.?Nobody projects that the latest rendition has a chance to approach, much less cross, the coveted $1 billion threshold. Heck, it won't even top Guardians 2, without even considering inflation.?

The problem is: by all accounts,?Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3?is a decent flick. I haven't seen it yet, but most reviews seem to think that it’s a good movie - not great, but good, and certainly better than most of its recent antecedents. This should be a grave alarm for Disney-Marvel and for the next movie to be released:?The Marvels.?If?Guardians of the Galaxy?can no longer hit it out of the park,?The Marvels?is grounding out at first, if not striking out at the plate entirely.

That said, I wondered at length how this had come to pass, from a business perspective. How had such fertile ground gone dry? What might be learned from this situation and applied more broadly to us folks in the business world? And after some late nights in front of the tube and a little research into the matter, I came up with a few business lessons that we might take away from this situation.?In no apparent order…

Have Clear, Business-Oriented Goals.?When you develop a product or service, what are your goals – what are you trying to achieve by providing this product or service? Goals can be internal and external.?Clearly understanding your target can certainly help you in adjusting your aim.?Does your execution strategy match your goals??If not, you might be running into a problem of tacit versus explicit goals, where the unstated goals of an organization undermine their stated goals. Whenever possible, get the goals out on the table and direct, discuss, and debate them.?What is the goal of a superhero film??Many would say it’s?escapism?– a two-hour foray into an intriguing world of heroes and villains that lifts its viewers out of the day-to-day and returns them refreshed and perhaps with a fresh perspective. A little escapism isn’t a bad thing – if you intend to do something else with a film, you may need to level set expectations. If someone comes into a film expecting to be entertained, and they leave with an earful of social commentary, they may feel like they did not get what they paid for.?Poorly-constructed films rarely provide the desired escapist results – unless they are “so bad they are good”. A bad movie distracts the viewer from the film’s escapist qualities.

Moreover, the goals you intend to achieve should impact your execution plan.?Do you wish to produce a structurally sound film??If so, you’ll need good writers. A well-crafted film? Good directors. A beautiful film? Good cinematographers.?A profitable film? That might be a little tricky.?It might be helpful here to ask: “what has worked in the past?” and “can we make this work in the future?” Do you wish to produce a product that will “change the world” in a social sense? Craft and care should be taken here, as we’ve all seen cases where messaging has been clumsily or half-heartedly inserted into a product, only for the results to be downright cringeworthy.?Moreover, if you intend to insert niche messaging into a product or service intended for general audiences, you may find that the only customers onboard and willing to pay for it are your niche.?Again, niche goals are not a bad thing, provided that they are explicitly defined at the onset, such that you can plan for the concomitant outcomes.?

Quality Matters.?I am an old six sigma fellow, so this hits home. The best and most successful Marvel movies tended to be structurally sound: solid plot, consistent world building, well-defined and relatable characters, and themes that emerge organically from the other elements. Marvel's more recent output has struggled in these areas to generate structurally-sound content.?It should be no surprise that if you bombard your customer base with inconsistent worlds, insufferable and unlikable characters, hackneyed plots, and ham-fisted, on-the-nose thematics, you will find fewer people showing up for your shows.?For us business types, the lesson should be clear: if you allow the quality of your product and service output to atrophy, you will find others who are willing to do it and do it better.

Don’t Oversaturate the Market.?If you create more product than your customers want or need, they will ignore it, especially if it’s of substandard quality. Over the past several years, Marvel has pushed streaming content at an immense pace – over 2021 and 2022, Marvel released eight separate series onto Disney’s streaming service for a total of 57 episodes. That’s a lot of content! And so much of it was of such an abysmal quality that it annoyed its audience and damaged the brand.?Moreover, they used their streaming series as an exercise in character assassination: they turned a highly sympathetic character in the?Scarlet Witch?into a villain, turned the menacing villain?Loki?into a simp, and we'll get to what they did to the?Daredevil?and the?Kingpin.?The net result was a consumer base that had consumed so much volume that it devalued their primary money-maker – the cinematic releases.

Set Yourself Up for Success.?While?Avengers: Endgame?grossed close to $3 billion in box office revenue, it created several plot holes, world-building quandaries, and character problems that would plague the next phase.?Moreover, it went so far as to kill off and humiliate many of its core characters, with the assumption that the mantle of hero could easily be passed onto a few fresh faces. Disney-Marvel assumed that their audience would simply acclimate to the new characters in the next phase. That was a big assumption. Needless to say, the new wave of Phase 4 heroes failed to resonate like their predecessors. That is, Phase 3’s?Endgame?left a mess in its wake, which Phase 4 failed to clean up. From a business perspective, the lesson is to make sure that the wins you score today do not come at the expense of the next venture. Make your success scalable.?

Don’t be Afraid of a Little Fan (Customer) Service.?What is fan service? It's customer service! Sometimes, it’s nice to slip in a little something that the fans will really enjoy. Case in point: the latest?Spiderman?movie succeeded by doing the unthinkable and bringing the three different versions of Spiderman together in the same room. At the end of the movie, when Tom Holland's?Spiderman?gave the Spidermen played by Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield a big goodbye hug, it brought a twinkle of warmth to my cold, dark heart.?I wasn't alone. In business terms, this can be summarized as follows: look for little ways to both surprise and delight your customers - the good will this generates will be exponential.

Fix the Things that are Broken, Not the Things that Work.?Speaking of fan service, it's surprisingly easy to do the opposite of fan service - to antagonize your customers by removing, replacing, or otherwise modifying the features and options they love, and replacing them with substandard substitutes. It’s a good idea to avoid breaking things that are working. What are some Marvel examples??Google "Fat Thor" and call me in the morning. Worse still, let’s use?Daredevil?as a case study: many of us see the?Daredevil?series, released by Netflix from 2015 – 2028, as the height of cinematic comic book artistry. And yet, over the past few years, the characters from the original series have been “reimagined” for new series, much to the chagrin of the original audience. We have, for instance, seen?the?Kingpin?humiliated in the?Hawkeye?series and?Daredevil?himself gelded in the?She-Hulk?series. For longtime fans, this is close to sacrilege (Matt Murdock was a Catholic, after all). Modifying something in a manner that makes it worse than its predecessor is not a feature - it’s a defect. Us old chaps remember a thing called "New Coke" back in the 80’s - that was forgettable. The sale principle applies, whether it's new Coke or new Hulk: avoid adding new and needless defects to the services and product you provide and rebuilding that which is already well-built.

Do Not Take Your Fanbase (Customers) for Granted.?I heard one YouTuber describe Marvel's fall as "mistaking their fan base for an ATM machine." One cannot sum it up better than that. It might have been an easy assumption, coming out of?Avengers: Endgame, that the Marvel fan base would continue to show up, no matter what was presented in front of them. But the last three years' of box office results have told a different story. Marvel put out inadequate product and assumed the fan base would continue to consume. But the fan base largely spit it out like an infant eating pureed peas for the first time. There are plenty of test cases of companies over the past fifty years (IBM, General Motors, etc.) whose market dominance was heroically undone by their own hubris, apathy, misdirection, and bureaucracy. Don’t get apathetic, and take your customers for granted, no matter how successful you are today. Customer good will is a plant that needs to be routinely-watered, else it will dry up tomorrow.

Don’t Attack Your Customers.?Some providers of goods and services go beyond apathy and actually go on the offensive when confronting disgruntled customers. If your customers are complaining about the products or services you provide, you have one of many choices to make in response. When critics and fans complained about Marvel's misfires, several producers, directors, actors, writers, and executives repeatedly lashed out in reply. Their response could often be summarized as follows: "If you don't like our content, then something must be wrong with?you!" In business, your critics are your proverbial coal-mine canaries - they provide much-needed feedback into what is or is not working. This is especially true when they also happen to be paying you for your products and services.?And writing off or attacking your critical customers due to differing opinions or conflicting ideologies is certainly a good way to go broke.

So where Does This Leave Us? In reviewing the lessons to be learned from Marvel’s recent failures, a simple thought occurred to me: You don’t need to be an immortal, an eternal, a super-human or a super-hero to be able to make good product and deliver quality services that both satisfy your customers and satisfy the bottom line. You don’t need to be super – but you do need to be good.?And being good starts with a few basic tenants and building from them. And staying good comes from remembering what got you there in the first place.?That said, may your hero’s journey be a successful character arc - one filled with growth and success, and not (pardon the pun) a?comical?failure.

Me, I think I'm going to give my comic book movie fetish a rest and go watch something a little more uplifting...like Taxi Driver.

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