MCU Phase 4 and beyond

[SeanR]

1 hour ago, Sexton Hardcastle said:

The fact movie companies rushed to buy up Marvel IP like Spider-Man, x-Men, FF etc. Whilst ignoring Cap & Iron Man tells you all you need to know about their popularity at the time. 

[Sexton Hardcastle]

Those are low budget straight to video releases though. 

[Sardan]

As I say, I understand that the x-men are hugely popular. And of course Spider-Man is - he’s had loads of series and cartoons. I’m not arguing against any of that. 
 

What I am arguing against is Cap and Iron Man being “c-tier”. They are absolutely not.

[JPL]

I don’t think I’d even heard of Iron Man or Captain America until the films came out. Saying that, I’ve never been into reading comics, but I doubt 99% of the people who watch the movies have either.

[Stig]

7 hours ago, The Hierophant said:

As I say, I understand that the x-men are hugely popular. And of course Spider-Man is - he’s had loads of series and cartoons. I’m not arguing against any of that. 
 

What I am arguing against is Cap and Iron Man being “c-tier”. They are absolutely not.

 

To comic book fans maybe not, to the general public they absolutly were. Maybe b-tier with Thor being c-tier.

[Haribokart]

50 minutes ago, JPL said:

I don’t think I’d even heard of Iron Man or Captain America until the films came out. Saying that, I’ve never been into reading comics, but I doubt 99% of the people who watch the movies have either.

 

Same. I think people here who grew up being into comics vastly overstate how well known they were until the MCU started.

[JohnC]

My first exposure to Captain America was seeing a restaurant in Dublin. I've never actually been in it though.

 

 

I have no idea how they came to be able to use the name. I assume it must be legit if Marvel, and especially Disney in the latter period, haven't sued them out of it in nearly 50 years.

[Sexton Hardcastle]

Probably have the same lawyer as Supermacs. 

[SeanR]

9 hours ago, Sexton Hardcastle said:

Those are low budget straight to video releases though. 

  

[Steve McQueef]

I was exposed to the 60s animated tales as a child in the 80s, so knew full well who they were.

 

Still have the Captain America one on DVD, as the story The Sleeper Shall Awake is fucking brilliant.

[JamesC]

As an avid comic reader in the late 80s/early 90s, I can confirm that very few of my school friends were aware of the likes of Cap, Iron Man, Thor, the FF or even the X-men. 

Older family members were even less aware. 

The characters they were familiar with were pretty much limited to those who'd had TV shows or films. Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk (always referred to as incredible, never just Hulk). 

The X-Men started to break through throughout the 90s with the cartoon and later the film. 

I think people really overestimate the cultural penetration of the comics. It was really all about TV/film exposure when I was growing up. I remember the incredulity that Robin wasn't going to be in the 1989 Batman film and the sense of genuine surprise as people started to realise Batman wasn't like the Adam West show any more. 

[Steven]

Had most of them as Mego action figures growing up.

 

[JohnC]

Who the hell is Speedy? And Kid Flash but no Flash?

[Sardan]

18 hours ago, JPL said:

I don’t think I’d even heard of Iron Man or Captain America until the films came out. Saying that, I’ve never been into reading comics, but I doubt 99% of the people who watch the movies have either.

 

18 hours ago, Stigweard said:

 

To comic book fans maybe not, to the general public they absolutly were. Maybe b-tier with Thor being c-tier.

Well on that basis the X-men weren’t A-tier either at least until the 1990s animated series.

 

The a-tier would be pretty narrow and only have the likes of Spider-Man, The Hulk, Batman, Superman, perhaps Wonder Woman. 

[JamesC]

It's worth remembering that film companies in the 90s weren't averse to spending money on B and C tier properties. Remember The Phantom, The Shadow and Blade? 

 

At the time of the film's release, The X-Men certainly weren't on the A list in terms of public recognition in the UK. In terms of the demographic who the film was aimed at, enough people knew who they were to ensure bums on seats, especially with the star power of up-and-comers like Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romjin and the more established Halle Berry. Plus Sci fi genre favourite Patrick Stewart. 

 

In the US the X-Men were far better known of course. 

[JamesC]

Oh, and it wasn't until after the 1989 film that Batman was generally accepted as being a solo hero - it was always Batman and Robin as far as the older generation and non-comics people were concerned. 

[Nick R]

I think we're mixing up popularity among comics fans, and recognition among the general public.

 

A-tier: Known to non-comics readers via TV/film adaptations and iconography: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Hulk.

 

B-tier: Selling well to comics fans, but still not really known to non-comics readers: both Claremont's X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil were really popular in the early '80s (and X-Men was again in the early '90s).

 

C-tier: The ones that weren't even popular enough among comics fans for movie studios to want to buy the rights. Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Ant-Man, Dr Strange, Black Panther.

 

Also there's one other tier...

 

Spoiler

S-tier: Storm/Sentinel/Magneto. Marvel baybee! He so Pringles!

 

[Sardan]

5 hours ago, Nick R said:

I think we're mixing up popularity among comics fans, and recognition among the general public.

 

A-tier: Known to non-comics readers via TV/film adaptations and iconography: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Hulk.

 

B-tier: Selling well to comics fans, but still not really known to non-comics readers: both Claremont's X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil were really popular in the early '80s (and X-Men was again in the early '90s).

 

C-tier: The ones that weren't even popular enough among comics fans for movie studios to want to buy the rights. Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Ant-Man, Dr Strange, Black Panther.

 

Also there's one other tier...

 

  Hide contents

S-tier: Storm/Sentinel/Magneto. Marvel baybee! He so Pringles!

 

 

 

Iron Man and Cap were definitely better known than the others in that C-Tier list. 

[Stig]

13 minutes ago, The Hierophant said:

 

 

Iron Man and Cap were definitely better known than the others in that C-Tier list. 

 

I agree, I was never into Marvel comics and knew who they were long before the MCU was announced. More so Cap.

[Not Thread Owner]

On 21/11/2020 at 19:23, JohnC said:

My first exposure to Captain America was seeing a restaurant in Dublin. I've never actually been in it though.

 

 

I have no idea how they came to be able to use the name. I assume it must be legit if Marvel, and especially Disney in the latter period, haven't sued them out of it in nearly 50 years.

 

The one in Norwich was shut down.

[McCoy]

8 hours ago, Nick R said:

I think we're mixing up popularity among comics fans, and recognition among the general public.

 

A-tier: Known to non-comics readers via TV/film adaptations and iconography: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Hulk.

 

B-tier: Selling well to comics fans, but still not really known to non-comics readers: both Claremont's X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil were really popular in the early '80s (and X-Men was again in the early '90s).

 

C-tier: The ones that weren't even popular enough among comics fans for movie studios to want to buy the rights. Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Ant-Man, Dr Strange, Black Panther.

 

Also there's one other tier...

 

  Hide contents

S-tier: Storm/Sentinel/Magneto. Marvel baybee! He so Pringles!

 

 

Was Wonder Woman really A Tier? 

[Broker]

Essay post warning.

 

Ok, so it’s very tough to quantify any of these things directly, but to address just one point, the X-Men were not only popular towards the end of the 90’s. X-Men #1 from 1991 was and remains the best selling comic of all time. It sold over 8 million copies and has higher sales than any individual comic ever printed, including the entire golden age when comics generally sold much better than they ever have since. It also outsold the numerous comics that have been sold at 10c or less which are otherwise almost always the highest sellers of all time. It was the popularity of this comic that lead to the X-Men cartoon from the 90’s using it’s style and character designs. 

 

Obviously one metric for general popularity is sales. In those terms, Spider-Man has been Marvel’s most popular character since the 60’s, and nobody else is really close. He’s not quite Superman and Batman level, but is substantially more popular than the X-Men, who are Marvel’s second most popular characters. In terms of sales, Captain America is next, but this is thrown off by his incredible popularity during World War 2. There was a fall in popularity after that, but he has been consistently in print without any breaks to his main series since he was bought out of the ice in the 60’s. Next are the Avengers, as a group, though they’ve had some major reinventions during periods where they’ve been less popular. 

 

No other Marvel characters crack the top ten best selling comics of all time (though it’s worth noting for whoever suggested it was a less popular property that The Phantom does). Fantastic Four do also have a book in the individual all time best sellers. It’s definitely worth considering that when Marvel decided to reboot the majority of their continuity with heroes reborn in 1996 they targeted everything but Spider-Man and the X-Men, rebooting all Avengers comics and the FF, handing them off to new creators who had previously worked on X-Men titles. 

 

The other metric as people have mentioned is adaptation, the commercial viability of which will have been carefully considered by people investing money into making adaptations. As others have mentioned, there’s a very clear priority shown when selling these properties for adaptation. Although the X-Men movie got released first, Spider-Man movies have been in the works since the early 90’s and were always the first priority when selling or adapting properties. Spider-Man had a massively popular cartoon in the 60’s and another in the 70’s, as well as the 90’s one and much like in sales is the first port of call when adapting Marvel characters. Prior to the MCU only him and Hulk had ever had live action TV shows, and whilst the Hulk show made the character far better known than he was before, it was only taken up because the producer thought Hulk was closer to characters from classic literature, not due to any existing popularity suggesting the show was a good idea. In terms of cartoons, the FF were by far the most commonly represented before the 80’s, when Spider-Man predictably became the most popular. Of the 90’s cartoons, X-Men was the longest running and most popular, followed by Spider-Man. Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Hulk also got less popular cartoons during this period, and there was a short lived Silver Surfer one. After the 90’s animated series’ popular period, there was a short Avengers series and a short FF one, amongst numerous popular Spider-Man and X-Men ones. In terms of Cinema, it’s extremely telling that Daredevil, FF and Hulk were successfully sold to avoid Marvel going bankrupt, leaving Marvel with the rights to the characters that make up the MCU.

 

More anecdotally, I worked in Forbidden Planet from 2002-2005. During that period there was absolutely no competition, as the Avengers were at a low point in popularity. The Ultimate line lead with Spidey, then X-Men, then a break where Avengers characters appeared in USM before Ultimates launched, with a much wider departure from its inspiration than the others. Whilst the first two were like greatest hits comics, Ultimates, UFF and the others were much more like reboots, changing substantial parts of the story to try to make them more appealing. It’s around this time that the 616 continuity killed all the avengers and rebooted the main series, adding Spider-Man and Wolverine to the team. From reading comics in the early 90’s through to this period, the only MCU characters anyone outside the comic fandom were familiar with were Hulk and Cap.

 

I’m not going to try to construct a tier list, but I don’t think there’s any logical argument you can make that inside or outside the comic industry these were popular or well known characters before the MCU.

 

[Nick R]

32 minutes ago, McCoy said:

Was Wonder Woman really A Tier? 

 

In terms of recognition outside comics readers, yes, I think for a long time she was probably the most recognisable female superhero character name (even if most people couldn't tell you her powers or origin story).

 

In the '70s, she'd been on the cover of the first issue of Ms magazine, then got the Lynda Carter TV series. That might not have been as popular as the Adam West Batman or the Superman series of the '40s (radio) and '50s (TV), but it was probably the most prominent live-action superhero adaptation of the '70s until the first Superman movie and the Incredible Hulk series arrived.

[Sabreman]

I never read superhero comics as a kid (2000AD for life yo), though I did eventually get into them in my early-mid teens, springboarded off of The Dark Knight Returns. For me, big-hitter comic characters were defined by their TV shows and movies. Superman on the big screen, and Wonder Woman, Hulk, Spider-Man, and Batman on TV. Thor was a goofy character that popped up in Hulk a couple of times, and I'd probably heard of Captain America through cultural osmosis, but Iron Man*, the X-Men and certainly stuff like the Guardians were a complete mystery to me.

 

*aside from Arno Stark, "The Iron Man of 2020!" in Machine Man, which basically led me to believe that Iron Man was a complete jerk.

[Sardan]

8 hours ago, McCoy said:

 

Was Wonder Woman really A Tier? 

I’m torn on it, but if you grew up in the late 1970s or saw the repeats in the 1980s:

 

[Sardan]

I think a lot of this tier stuff is down to when you grew up and/or were exposed to comics. 

[JamesC]

8 hours ago, Broker said:

Essay post warning.

 

Ok, so it’s very tough to quantify any of these things directly, but to address just one point, the X-Men were not only popular towards the end of the 90’s. X-Men #1 from 1991 was and remains the best selling comic of all time. It sold over 8 million copies and has higher sales than any individual comic ever printed, including the entire golden age when comics generally sold much better than they ever have since. It also outsold the numerous comics that have been sold at 10c or less which are otherwise almost always the highest sellers of all time. It was the popularity of this comic that lead to the X-Men cartoon from the 90’s using it’s style and character designs. 

 

 

The thing is, to get our copies of X-Men #1, my mate and I had to make a half hour train journey from Gt Yarmouth to Norwich, which was where the nearest comic shop was. The comic wasn't on the shelf in WH Smiths or any of the regular newsagents (the same thing happened with Spider-Man #1). 

The comic may have been a big deal within the industry but it wasn't even available on the High Street for many people. And in terms of cultural penetration, 8 million worldwide sales is a poultry number when compared against other media like film/TV viewing figures, record sales or even sales of regular magazines. 

In terms of mainstream impact, by far the biggest story of the 90s was The Death of Superman, which made news headlines around the world and even resulted in a full cast audio adaptation broadcast on Radio 1. The X-Men couldn't touch that level of mainstream recognition. 

[Broker]

Given that the original "C Tier" comment was referring to popularity and visibility outside of comic book fans, I don't think comic book sales are the ones to focus on. It's also extremely difficult as comic sales aren't widely reported so it's hard to deduce what the most popular actually were. Assuming we're talking about wider cultural impact I'd absolutely agree that there were almost no Marvel comics events or series that had a wide impact outside of the industry like The Death of Superman did. So assuming that we're looking at adaptations which might have been visible to people outside of comic fans, you've got movies (cinematic and straight to video), live action TV and cartoons. With this as the baseline and counting movies and seasons of TV, my points stand pretty well.

 

 

Not including Blade (as the movies weren't super hero films and weren't widely marketed with Marvel branding), Spider-Man is Marvel's only A Tier character pre 2008. X-Men, FF and Hulk are B Tier, the rest are C, assuming that we're tiering things based on grouping them by similar levels of success. So I guess you could argue that my initial statement that they built the MCU from C Tier characters is slightly off because Hulk was a B Tier character. You could also adjust for Hollywood movies being more culturally important that STV movies and TV, or possibly argue that live action TV was more important than cartoons, but those arguments wouldn't meaningfully change anything for MCU characters who aren't Hulk, and they would affect Spider-Man and the X-Men far more than they would him. At best trying to account for those things might push Hulk above the FF and bring Punisher and Daredevil to the top of C Tier, but it's not making a difference overall. As accurate ratings data is hard to come by for older TV shows, it's going to be difficult to work out how many people saw the TV shows, but I suppose you could try to work out rating data to get an audience, then do similar for movie grosses divided by average ticket prices to try to work out a number of people who saw each thing, but I can't see that making much difference to the MCU characters either. Whatever way you quantify it, they were never Marvel's most popular characters in terms of adaptation. 

 

[JamesC]

I agree with the above post. 

 

I think you can make some general assumptions that prime time shows (which tend to be live action) have more mainstream impact than Saturday morning cartoons/children's shows. 

So I'd argue that Lois & Clark/The New Adventures of Superman had more mainstream impact than the X-Men cartoon. 

But as you said, it doesn't make much difference. 

 

Also, successful film and TV obviously has more impact than the flops. 

[Broker]

33 minutes ago, The Hierophant said:

I think a lot of this tier stuff is down to when you grew up and/or were exposed to comics. 

 

Nope. Unless you grew up during World War 2, there was never a time before 2008 and the MCU starting when any of those characters could be argued in any way to have been as popular as Spider-Man and the X-Men in comic book sales or impact. Spider-Man is always top, X-Men and FF are the only people close. Hence the rest being, in both wider cultural impact and within comic book fandom, C Tier Marvel characters.