I think a lot of the credit should also go to the Hong Kong action cinema revolution of the late 80s / early 90s. Even without CGI, fantastic kung-fu and gun-fu superhuman action scenes could now be credibly choreographed and performed in a fluid ‘realistic’ presentation instead of relying on old unrealistic Shaw Brothers style tropes (e.g. punch, pause, punch, pause, react, punch, pause). Cites like Yuen Woping or John Woo. The doors for Hollywood burst open when The Matrix repackaged this new style for the western market.
The very first MCU movie features one of the finest actors alive today, Jeff Bridges. The next one employs two more in Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell…yesss…I know they are horribly wasted, but the sentiment to get the best was there!
Also I think ‘has-been’ is a teeny bit much. Downey had just made Zodiac after all. That film where he, Mysterio, Stryker and Banner unsuccessfully solve the Zodiac murders.
I agree that “has-been” isn’t exactly the right description of Downey in 2008, before Iron Man. He had earned a reputation as being unreliable, due to his history of substance abuse. Although he was apparently clean in the years leading up to the first Iron Man film, and was receiving some notice for his parts in movies like Zodiac and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, I think Downey was still seen as a poster child for wasted potential before he became Tony Stark.
Ha - I remember my roommate at the time complaining about the casting of Downey. He wasn’t all that familiar with Stark’s character, and my roommate said something like, “why would they cast this brooding drug addict to be a superhero?”. Once I told him a little bit about Tony Stark, it suddenly made sense to him.
Exactly! When they announced that they’d cast Downey as Stark, I thought it was absolutely brilliant casting, if he was able to stay sober and out of trouble long enough to finish filming.
Which is, I think, part of why the MCU movies have done so well (and as has been already mentioned) – I think that they have done a tremendous job with casting the roles, and finding actors who have really inhabited the roles and made the characters their own.
I don’t think anyone answered your question here directly. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say no. First, the audience for SH films is all ages. Second, the increase in interest in SH films hasn’t been matched by an increase in the actual comic books, as near as I can tell.
I think a better question is, why did the execs back in the day figure out that superhero movies could be wildly successful? Superman (1978) was a huge hit, but no one thought to follow it up with a Batman or Wonder Woman movie. Instead they just kept making more Superman movies, each one doing worse than the one before it. Same thing with Batman (1989). Huge hit, but they didn’t bother to make a non-Batman movie until 1997 (Steel).
Superman was great in many ways, but it is obvious now that the studio had no idea what to do. They fired Dick Donner and brought in a totally incompetent director to replace him. Superman 2 slid by on Donner’s contributions(some of which were duplicated without him). However, the 3rd one was a total disaster due to the idea that it should be “funny”. The 4th one was sold-off and made by another company.
What helped with the marvel movies is that they:
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Made an excellent first movie. I re-watched Iron Man recently and forgot how good it is. (they…almost ruined Iron Man 2…yikes)
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Planned out in advance having all the heroes meet up in Avengers
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Hired Joss Whedon to make Avengers. A hugely important and correct decision.
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Gradually rolled out new heroes after Avengers, including the amazing Guardians movie and a few other good ones as well.
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they course corrected. Captain America 2 and 3, Thor 2 and 3, and Iron Man 3 all course correct errors with the previous movies. Yes, I like Thor 2 more than Thor 1.
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struck gold by getting the Russo brothers who actually turned out to be brilliant directors in this area
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casting, casting, casting. Almost every single hero is correct cast. I would not replace anyone except maybe Hawkeye and Falcon, who are played by “generic dudes” in my opinion.
Incorrect, Iron Man was not the first MCU film. That distinction belongs to the second Incredible Hulk film (and even then that particular film vaguely implies the first one sorta maybe counts).
Which figures, as Hulk was Marvel Studios biggest name they still had film rights for. No doubt the live action TV show played a major part in cementing Hulk in pop culture consciousness.
People tend not to realize that pre-MCU, Iron Man was B-tier Marvel at best.
Trancephalic:
Iron Man: opened May 2, 2008
Incredible Hulk: opened June 15, 2008
sourceL IMDB
Maybe the character had faded in the nineties. But he was certainly a major character during the late seventies and early eighties when you had Michelinie, Layton, and Romita doing his series.
…so I think its fair to add Sarah Finn, Casting Director who cast almost every actor in the MCU to the list of things that have made these movies such a success. 
I think part of the issues is that after the '78 Superman, the studio execs said, “Ok…that went well…let’s think about doing another. Anyone got any good story ideas? Oh, and we made a pile of cash off of it, but we can make even more if we slash the budget by a third to a half.”
In the MCU, someone had a general idea of where the whole thing was heading from Day 1, or at least made sure that follow-on movies made sense to a greater overall narrative, and didn’t skimp on budgeting on anything.
I think that Thor: The Dark World was probably the weakest of the MCU movies, but I’ll agree that they definitely learned lessons from the first one, and applied those lessons. In the first Thor movie, they saw that Hemsworth and Hiddleston had great chemistry together, and so for the second one, they put in lots of interaction between them, which worked great. I don’t think that it was enough to make the movie as a whole great, but that one part of it certainly worked very well.
Similarly with the two Ant-Man movies. Plan A for Ant-Man and the Wasp had to have been to base the movie on the interactions between the two title characters. But while they were both fine in their roles individually, they had absolutely no chemistry with each other. So what did they give us in Ant-Man and the Wasp? A whole lot of interaction between Lang and his daughter, and a whole lot between Hope and her father, both of which were great.
In most of the world, as iconic and had a better image pre-MCU, not being linked to America rah-rah-ism. Once upon a time, I was in a Barcelona Comic Book Week which had seen several special releases from Marvel’s Spanish publisher (as usual), and these included a couple that Stan Lee was surprised weren’t working (one of them wasn’t even being bought by the biggest collectors, since we considered it directly and enormously offensive*); he was also surprised that Captain America didn’t sell well at all (he was paired up with Thor, and people bought those books because of Simonson’s Thor; Cap by himself couldn’t have sold lollipops in front of a school). Watching the Spanish editors try to explain it in English with correct grammar rather than just pull their hair out in cussy Spanish was, ah, interesting. Lee finally got it but it took a while.
Note that the MCU’s Cap is nowhere near as much of a political bore as the comic-book Cap was for decades.
- Wolverine in the Spanish Civil War. “Directly and enormously offensive” is an eufemism.
This made me nod, because it’s exactly what I said to Bob Trole back in the early sixties. He was wondering aloud why I liked Spider-Man, “cuz he’s just a kid, and he’s got problems…”
"Exactly! Spider-Man is a real person with real problems!"
As life turned out, the same rationale also works for why, fifty years later, I prefer Marvel movies to DC movies. And Spidey’s neuroses to Supe’s flatter affect.
I gotta find Bob and tell him!
No way, Iron Man came out first.
Exactly. MCU Cap is my fave Avenger and set of movies. …comic-books? I think I’ve bought ONE Cap comic in my life and that was a tie-in.
See, I’d say the movies are the opposite. DC tried to go the ‘realer’ route and it didn’t resonate. Marvel movie characters act like characters.
DC thought they were going the “realer” route, but they picked and chose only the parts of reality that suck.