This is Part Four in a series.
Okay, so let’s talk about what everyone wants to do, an Expanded or Connected Universe. Oh, but only Marvel can do those. Well, here’s the question. Why is Marvel the only one who can do it? DC has done it, not on film, but they did it in the comics just fine. In fact, DC Comics started out as entirely separate stories; it was only over time that they became interconnected. Kingdom Hearts has done it, connecting various unrelated Disney Movies into a single narrative, granted the way they’ve done it is utterly confusing regarding the lore, but it’s worked. Voltron did it, connecting two wholly unrelated anime series into a single cohesive narrative. Robotech did it, combining three utterly separate anime series into a single coherent story.
It can be done, it’s not impossible, but it is hard. You have to stop focusing on getting to the connected world and tell a good story. For most of the first Iron Man film, we don’t even realize it’s part of a larger universe, same with the Edward Norton Hulk film. Focus on the story first. Also, have an idea of the overall story you’re trying to tell. For the first phase of Marvel films, that story was the formation of the Avengers, though they laid the groundwork by introducing the Tesseract for the next overarching story they wanted to tell about the Infinity Gauntlet, and then set that storyline fully in motion during the events of the first Avengers film and in its post-credit scenes.
You can’t rush into a connected universe; we must care about the characters first. We have to want to know more about them, which will make us want to know more about the world they live in. You can maybe try to sell us on the world instead of the characters, but that’s a harder thing to do, it can be done. JRR Tolkien sold people on the world of the Hobbit and then got to write the Lord of the Rings. With Star Wars the setting was the real star of the first film, at least for George Lucas, but the characters were still solid if a bit generic in some ways. And by generic, I mean they were all kind of archetypes, which doesn’t mean bad.
Anyway, the Dark Universe about the Universal Monsters utterly flopped, because they spent so much time trying to establish a world, they sort of forgot to tell the story of the characters that were in the movie. The DCEU flopped because they were rushing through the characters to get to the connected universe. Maybe if they had let Zack Snyder make his Superman Trilogy where he would have ended up as the Superman people know at the end, things would have gone differently, but Warner Bros wasn’t willing to stick with that vision after Man of Steel didn’t do as well as they hoped. And that’s kind of the other thing with expanded universes; you must pick a vision and stick with it. You can make minor adjustments, but you can’t try and completely restructure the story, especially when you’re trying to establish it. You need to build up some good will and momentum before you completely change course.
Anyway, this entire series of posts is all about how I would do an expanded universe. Which expanded universe you ask with dread in your voice? A Hasbroverse. Now, there are three ways of doing a Hasbroverse. And the first two are the same. Both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons have a multiverse. Each property that Hasbro owns takes place in a different universe within this multiverse, either using Magic: The Gathering as the base universe or Dungeons and Dragons as the base universe. But those two approaches are boring, they’re the easy answer. That’s not what we’re going to do here. Nope, we’re going to connect things in a single universe. And we’re going to have an overarching theme/story for that universe. What is said story? What would happen if humans got their hands on alien technology? Hence the first property we’ll start with, is Transformers. Yeah, we’re going to do each property in this connected universe as its own post, because honestly, there are a lot of them. Before we get to that though, we need to set some ground rules, that’s the next post.
A New Hasbroverse 