The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe - Softcover

Flanagan, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501338536 ISBN 13: 9781501338533

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

Marvel Studios has provided some of the biggest worldwide cinematic hits of the last eight years, from Iron Man (2008) to the record-breaking The Avengers (2012), and beyond. Having announced plans to extend its production of connected texts in cinema, network and online television until at least 2028, the new aesthetic patterns brought about by Marvel's 'shared' media universe demand analysis and understanding.

The Marvel Studios Phenomenon evaluates the studio's identity, as well as its status within the structures of parent Disney. In a new set of readings of key texts such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the thematics of superhero fiction and the role of fandom are considered. The authors identify milestones from Marvel's complex and controversial business history, allowing us to appraise its industrial status: from a comic publisher keen to exploit its intellectual property, to an independent producer, to successful subsidiary of a vast entertainment empire.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Flanagan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Salford, UK. His work studies the forms of contemporary Hollywood entertainment. As an author he has contributed to the New Review of Film and Television Studies and Scope, and the edited collections Web-Spinning Heroics (2012) and Film and Comic Books (2007). His monograph, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (2009), explores and situates superheroic narratives within wider Hollywood generic traditions.

Andy Livingstone is a writer for Cinema 22 magazine and neophyte documentary filmmaker, working in Manchester's independent cinema scene. Areas of focus in his academic program included transmedia and the marketing and genre placement of comic book adaptations, both of which subjects he considered in extended projects.

Mike McKenny has covered the UK festival sector and provided feature articles for Film and Festivals. As a film programmer, he led community cinema Miniciné to win the national (UK) award for Best Film Programming in 2012. His academic training in Film and Business Studies has fostered a keen focus and understanding of business environments as they specifically pertain to modern entertainment organisations.

Review:

The Marvel Studios Phenomenon presents an important industrial analysis and history for both fans of the Marvel Universe/Marvel Cinematic Universe and film and media studies scholars ... The text is suitable for wider audiences as well as for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

This is a remarkable achievement - at once a detailed history and an astute assessment of Marvel, and particularly its symbiosis with Hollywood since the release of Iron Man in 2008. In the charting the rise of Marvel Studios and the strategic formulation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, authors Flanagan, McKenny and Livingstone provide an intimate, enlightening portrait of the company that has reshaped popular cinema on a global scale and effectively reinvented the Hollywood studio system.
Thomas Schatz, Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most audacious innovation in the history of the blockbuster. It is a transformation that exists beyond the individual film, both off in the Asgardian world of the studio imaginary and in the spinner-racks of local comics stores. The Marvel Studios Phenomenon takes it all in-the whole transmedial ball of wax-and shows what can happen when we give corporate form the same close attention we give our favorite movies, television shows, and comic books. Flanagan, McKenny, and Livingstone show how "It's All Connected, ]? everything from character and story through strategic decisions and fan communities. This book is both up-to-the-minute and sure to be a touchstone when we look back at Hollywood's ability to reinvent storytelling-and itself-for the 21st century.
J.D. Connor, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and History of Art, Yale University, USA

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501338536
• ISBN 13: 9781501338533
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288