The Cinematic Universe
It starts with a short scene after the credits of Iron Man in 2008. Nick Fury appears and says there is a bigger story. That scene was the invention. But it did not begin the way people assume. Kevin Feige has looked back on it: Samuel L. Jackson is showing up tomorrow to do a favour, he'll just show up and we're going to wing it. Not a grand blueprint being executed — improvised. The structure Feige describes came from comics. Ten, twelve, fifteen issues of each character's own book, then a crossover event, then everyone goes back to their own book. He took that reading pattern and mapped it onto a release schedule. By 2024 there were 45 films and more than $30 billion worldwide. The top spot, though, lasted a moment. Avengers: Endgame passed Avatar in July 2019, Avatar took it back, and it now sits second. The objections were not of one voice either. Scorsese called them theme parks in a magazine interview in October 2019, then restated it himself in a newspaper essay that November. Coppola used a stronger word in Lyon and later walked it back. And the studios that followed mostly did not manage it. Universal's attempt with its classic monsters stopped after one film, and its chairman Donna Langley concluded that the world had not been asking for a shared universe. DC's ran 16 films over ten years and closed in 2023. What is usually named as the difference is how many solo films came before the gathering, and whether one person was watching the whole thing. The only one still running elsewhere is the Godzilla and Kong group, which began the most quietly.
One last thing, and it is the thing I most want on this page. This form is probably not new. In 1943, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man put monsters from separate series into one film. The following year, House of Frankenstein had Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's monster together. In 1962 Toho bought the rights to another studio's King Kong for 80 million yen and set it against its own Godzilla; its 11.2 million admissions are still the highest of any Godzilla film. People did this 65 years ago, and 46 years ago. But to be honest, there is not enough to draw that as a line. Calling those the first shared universe is a later generation's criticism, and I could not find a record of today's filmmakers naming them as precedents. So the two lines running back from this node are the faintest kind on this map — my own reading. I am leaving them faint.