Quantum Overload: How Can Marvel Overcome Its Over-Complication and Saturation in an Expanding Multiverse?

By now, you know the story.

During a particularly rough patch in the ‘90s, longtime comic book giant Marvel Entertainment decided it needed an influx of cash. Over the course of a decade, the company licensed out the film rights to nearly all of its most well-known superheroes – Spider-Man to Sony, Hulk to Universal, X-Men, Daredevil, and Fantastic Four to Fox…

What Marvel leaders couldn’t have known then was that superheroes would explode into the cinematic landscape beginning with 1999’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man, becoming big budget box office gold.

No doubt regretting its character fire sale a decade earlier, creatives at the comic book giant (led by Avi Arad and Kevin Feige) regrouped to discover that despite their most famous characters being scattered to the studio winds, Marvel had managed to retain the rights to a ragtag crew of heroes known only by the nerdiest comic book aficionados – relative nobodies like a frozen-and-thawed WWII veteran, an interstellar Norse god, and a billionaire industrialist in a metal suit who all just happened to belong to a larger comic book team called… The Avengers.

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



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