Marvel & DC: Learn From Them How to (Not) Run Brand-Based IP Businesses

Earlier this week I posted the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War. Naturally, the channels about the business that I follow would also talk about it in their podcasts and you folks ought to hear it for yourselves. (Note for the World Class Bullshitters podcast: you can bail after they stop talking about Marvel and DC.)

I hope that you pay attention to their talk about the business considerations driving these film franchises. It's clear that the folks at DC are incompetent twats while the folks at Marvel are (for now) not dumber than a box of rocks. (However, the poz seems to be seeping in there, as the follow-ups to the Infinity War arc have the signs of SJW bullshit being all over it and--however faithful to the source material it is--Black Panther cannot shake the constant and significant derision of being "WE WUZ KANGZ: DA MOVIE!" (Fair or not, that's how it's getting seen out there.)

Following on from a previous Midnight's Edge video on why non-Marvel cinematic universes routinely fail, we see another piece of the puzzle become brick-to-the-face obvious: producer-centric editorial control, returning the Old Hollywood practice of studio moguls being the shot-callers to a new context with a new justification for doing so. We see this sort of thing being behind how Lucasfilm runs their film franchise also, as Kathleen Kennedy is not afraid to remind directors that they are hired guns doing Work For Hire and not true partners working as collaborators.

In short, directors and writers are hired to produce a branded product possessing their signature style within editorial limits. Lucasfilm wants a Star Wars-branded product version of (director)'s style, in the genre said director is famous for and reliably delivers to market. The same applies to Marvel, and when directors realize what their limits are within such considerations they actually don't seem to mind too much; the same applies to writers, most of whom know that the realities of the business drive things like changing a character from the source material depiction to something more market-friendly (e.g. Doctor Strange and The Ancient One), so they keep calm and carry on.

The folks who are failing are those that cannot admit that this is the case and adjust their personal and corporate operations to adapt to reality. DC can't do this, and neither can Warner Brothers more generally, which is why Marvel (and Disney) are eating their lunch. Learning how to operate a fictional setting as a brand-based business is turning into a vital skill to have for IP-based businesses such as comics, but this does scale down to the realm of SF/F publishing- but for the authors, not the publishers, so it does matter for folks who manage to find an audience with their fictional works (e.g. Larry Correia an Monster Hunter International) to pay attention to these matters going forward.