Welcome To Make Mine Marvel

The entire model of cinema is built on risks. People taking leaps of faiths solely because they believe in the artform of storytelling. That was the sort of perilous situation the folks starting up Marvel Studios found themselves in during the middle portion of the first decade of the 21st century. Adaptations of the characters Marvel had made over the countless years had ranged in quality, with some like Spider-Man 2 being of a high caliber of quality. But then there was Howard The Duck, The Hulk and Fantastic Four and forthcoming films like X-Men: The Last Stand, Ghost Rider and Spider-Man 3.

These movies not only missed what made the beloved superheroes so popular in the first place, they also forgot about making these into features that could stand on their own as good cinema. Now, Marvel Studios, with $525 million in financing from Merrill Lynch, was out to bring the characters they still had the film rights to in a way that would be both profitable and artistically successful. A similar previous effort to create a multitude of features based on their comic book characters in collaboration with Artisan Entertainment didn't yield much success, but this massive endeavor wound up finding some level of opulence, to put it very very lightly.

With The Avengers: Age of Ultron on the horizon, I think it's time to look back on the 10 movies the Marvel Cinematic Universe has created. Starting today, and all the way through April 29, I'll look at each of the films in this epic saga in a series of editorials entitled Make Mine Marvel and analyze the qualities, flaws and impact on pop culture at large of each individual motion picture. Join me, won't you, for an adventure that's gonna be loads and loads of nerdy fun!