Brings Plenty: Why Marvel continues to make good movies

Marvel is one of the few franchises that continues to make good movies no matter how many movies are made.

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Attendees sit in front of an illuminated Marvel sign during the second day of Comic-Con 2016 on July 21, 2016 in San Diego. (Harrison Hill/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Maleaha Brings Plenty, Opinions Columnist

Poor acting, boring and repetitive storylines, bland or nonexistent character development: These are all symptoms of a franchise overextending itself. This is a common occurrence: A franchise starts out and makes a lot of money from its first or second movie.

But it doesn’t end it there. The minds that be decide they’re going to continue the franchise, even though it very easily could have ended after the first or second movie.

TV shows are big culprits of this, as well. Most are popular and successful through the first six seasons, but most become monotonous after that. However, there are some franchises that manage to keep the quality consistent throughout, no matter how many movies or seasons are made. In my opinion, Marvel is one of those franchises.

The Marvel franchise has been going for almost 11 years now, and, overall, the quality of the movies hasn’t dropped at all. In fact, the franchise is still going strong. Recent releases such as Captain Marvel and the much-anticipated release of Avengers: Endgame prove that Marvel is just as relevant — if not more so — as it has ever been. There are still intriguing plotlines and interesting character development. Why is that? Why is Marvel still making good — or at least entertaining — movies even though it has been a franchise for so long? And why do other franchises fall by the wayside the longer they go on?

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Marvel is many things, but I think many can agree that it is definitely not repetitive. Sure, we have the classic superhero trope: average people hit rock bottom, find out they have/have been given superpowers, question themselves, get defeated by bad guy, hit rock bottom again, get encouraged by friends, defeat bad guy.

This trope can be seen over and over again with a lot of superhero movies, including Marvel movies. But its characters are three-dimensional, unique, and interesting. Marvel isn’t recycling characters or backstories. Each movie and each character are different, but they all contribute to the larger picture.

Lack of character development is one symptom of a franchise going on for too long. Marvel has proven to show its characters growing and changing in both realistic and interesting ways. It creates intriguing storylines that stick with the overlying plot — a group of superheroes who are saving the universe and are trying to keep the Tesseract out of the wrong hands — but it also branches out just enough to keep the story interesting, Marvel manages to keep its characters relevant and intriguing.

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Some franchises fall into two-dimensional character “building,” which results in very little to no character development at all. On the other hand, there are franchises that completely change a character purely for shock value (looking at you, Crimes of Grindelwald). Marvel seems to understand its characters and its audience as well.

Overall, it’s almost a miracle that Marvel still continues to keep the quality of its movies consistent through the years. Other franchises — Star Wars, Supernatural, Doctor Who — tend to start out strong but the quality degrades the further along they go. With each new movie or series, it seems as if they’re losing bits of their core material. Marvel is one of the very few franchises that manages to stick to its roots while also branching out and growing into something huge. I hope Marvel can keep this up in the future and avoid falling into the traps so many other once-good franchises have dug themselves into.