The Summer of Capes and Worldbuilding

I’m a fantasy and science fiction writer, so, of course I study worldbuilding. As opposed to the worldbuilding itself, I rather like to examine the implementation of it. My favorite style tends to be “I’ll tell you what you need to know for the next little bit, then move on.” I don’t particularly for long drawn out expositions or histories. I don’t really need to know why a thing is the way it is in every detail. That preference informs my own writing. I, as the creator, know everything about everything, but I prefer to parcel it out. And while I tend to shy away from books that favor huge exposition dumps, I know a lot of people like them.
A single books versus a series versus TV shows versus movies all have different limitations and methods they can use to build the world of the story. Our big super hero comic books worlds being long form being longform, text, and visual have a lot of things to work with. At the same time because they are so big and they are so long and so many people are working on it at once, there’s just a lot of stuff there that isn’t always one hundred percent consistent.
And unless you start with issue 1 of your story or character of choice (which could be dropping you back into the 1930s), you’re starting in the middle of everything. So to read comics, you have to be comfortable with jumping in and trusting that the comic will tell you what you need to know in the moment (which they’re very good at doing). This does raise a very interesting challenge, however, for screen adaptation. In that “where do you start?” What chunk of story do you tell, and, more importantly, how much of the world can you establish in the process?
The birth of Venom has been adapted at minimum six times between live action, animation, and video games. There are massive liberties taken each time (sometimes because they’re pulling from the ultimate universe). If you wanted to do even a streamlined full exploration of the birth of Venom, you’d have to start with Secret Wars, have at least a little Alien Suit saga, cover the Death of Jean DeWolff, have the Fantastic Four in the setting, leave a gap between the bell tower scene and Venom first showing up, and maybe, if you were being cheeky, in that gap show the transition from dating Felicia to marrying Mary Jane. And there’s just not a single adaptation that’s had all those pieces.
It’s in fact super common for an adaption to stay within its sort of IP carousel despite the fact that it belongs to a bigger universe. It’s also really common to cover the exact same set of stories over and over again because that’s what people expect from a new set of adaptations.
Nineties animation had a number of cross-overs, but as character rights got scattered between companies, big budget movies couldn’t make those same decisions. Spider-Man 3 came out in 2007. Imagine if Reed from the 2005 Fantastic Four movie could make a cameo and help Peter out with the symbiote? That would have been extremely cool. That’s why, in concept, the MCU and the Snyder-era DCU were such a big deal. We’re finally going to take all these characters and make them actually live together in the movies and maybe possibly move things forward.
Yet both can be very hit and miss in doing that effectively. For the MCU, specifically, it can feel more like a chore to keep up with everything as opposed to all the narratives living in a bigger world. It really struggles to maintain the balance between the two all the time, but it when it does hit it really hits.
Then we had two superhero movies come out this month who understood the above issue and actually did something to try to strike that balance.
What’s interesting about Superman is he’s one of those characters who doesn’t actually get a long introduction in his first appearance. It’s seven panels. Then his backstory continues developing over the next four decades. This most recent Superman movie kind of understands that. It gives us a version of Superman that sort of resembles his first appearance: already been doing it for awhile and doesn’t know all the details of his past. It also gives us Superman living in a world already comfortably inhabited by metahumans. So we get to see Superman in the context of his interactions with other super people in addition to the general rabble. It’s dropping us into the middle of an ongoing story and world in the same way comics so very frequently do.
And having other supers to compare him to shows just how special Superman really is within this broader universe.
For Fantastic Four: First Steps I was briefly worried we’d be getting another origin story. Worried because we’ve done that twice now, and it’s honestly not…actually…that interesting. Instead this movie did what the actual first appearance of the Fantastic Four does. Here they are, here are there powers, here’s a brief flashback, now let’s get back to the story.
Here we have people who’ve existed with powers for four years already. However, while their threats are superpowered, they’re the only heroes in residence. For the Fantastic Four, though, that superpowered solitude is essential to the narrative at play. They’re the only ones that can do what they do, and the entire world is at risk. No one is coming to help. If they were in the rest of the MCU, that wouldn’t work.
At the same time, the presence of all these smaller threats speaks to a more complex and complicated world in terms of dangers to the human race. It speaks to the more day-to-day experience of the Fantastic Four in this setting. They’re regularly dealing with smaller-form threats, instead of moving from major world-affecting disaster to disaster like other storylines in the MCU, so far. It adds a breadth of experience to the movie side of things and shows that scale of street-level to cosmic while still tackling The Big Story of the Fantastic Four.
It’s an approach that only worked by pulling the Fantastic Four out of the pre-established lore to do their own thing. It was actually clever to temporarily abandon all the worldbuilding that had already been done to form a new one up quickly. And they did it well. So while the rest of the MCU can feel a little hollow because why doesn’t Spider-Man appear in Daredevil: Born Again, like, bro, he should totally be there, Fantastic Four benefits from living outside it.
Both these movies show taking a shift in the way we approach these big universes, and with superhero fatigue constantly imminent, that needs to happen now, more than ever. Because there is so much cool shit that’s never been covered, and it would be sick to actually get there, at some point.