What Every Creative Can Learn From The Success of Superhero Movies
Why broccoli holds the secret to movie franchises, what scaring mice has to do with staying relevant, and why nerds and geeks will rule the world.
In 1998, none of the top 10 biggest films were sequels or superhero movies, and films based on comics accounted for just 0.69% of the box office.
In 20 years, a lot has changed. In 2018, all of the 10 biggest films were either sequels, prequels, or extensions of a franchise. Marvel studios is at the forefront of this phenomenon, with their movies grossing more than $17 Billion in the last 10 years.
What can we learn about creating things from Marvel’s meteoric success?
Finding Fortune through Fandoms
The movie The Martian (2015), directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, about an astronaut stranded on Mars was a huge success — it grossed almost $630 million, was the 10th biggest film of the year, and was nominated for 7 academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The book it was based on was an Amazon bestseller and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 76 weeks.
What you might not know, is that it started as a meager story series written on the author, Andy Weir’s blog.
Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people.
While he always had a passion for writing, as the son of a particle physicist and electrical engineer, Weir took the economically safe option and studied programming in university.
As he started experimenting with writing on the internet, he realized that his readers were like him —
They’re picky, little, snot nosed brats when it comes to science, which I am… You read something and you’re like, well that’s not right, and you’re taken out of the story entirely.
So I wanted to make sure dorks like me would enjoy the book I was writing, so I put a huge amount of effort into being as scientifically accurate as possible.
He crafted his story for a very niche group of highly skilled scientists, programmers, and engineers. Each couple of months he would write a chapter, and he’d get feedback from his readers, “and they would tell me all the mistakes I made”.
Successful ideas grow most predictably when they tap into a small network of people who do not see themselves as mainstream, but rather bound by an idea or commonality they consider special.
A book written chapter by chapter on a blog for a group of nerds isn’t what you’d expect would become one of the best selling books and the biggest movie of the year.
Except, perhaps rather counter-intuitively, it’s precisely because of how niche it was that it became successful.
We see patterns all over history of ideas that were created for a niche community that became immensely popular and mainstream.
Nate Silver used his knowledge of statistics to create one of the most popular data journalism organizations in the world. Kurt Cobain took the inward-looking and anti-establishment genre of punk rock and (rather ironically) turned Nirvana into one of the best-selling bands of all time.
People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird
The same thing applies to Marvel. Comic book subculture is one of the most devoted in the world, with hardcore fans, collectors, and events like the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the biggest conventions in the world.
It’s no surprise that their movies are so popular. Marvel didn’t create its fans from scratch, there were already millions of people ready to line up to watch their favorite superhero on the screen before these movies were even thought of.
To create things people love, a winning strategy is to just tap into existing networks of people who are already crazy about something.
Familiar, but not too familiar
Like many, I have several unpleasant memories from my childhood of being forced to eat Broccoli. (Something that tastes so bad is surely not meant to be eaten)
And while my parents wouldn’t have been too happy to hear this, it turns out that science might have my back on this one.
Scientists have found that Broccoli has evolved to produce a bitter substance called goitrin to ward off animals that would potentially eat it. That disgusting taste that you hated when you ate Broccoli? That was goitrin.
However, in a terrible twist (for children, at least), it is possible to get children accustomed to the bitter taste of goitrin, all you need is repetition. A study found that children need to be presented with new food up to 15 times before they begin to like them.
I’ve been served broccoli more than 15 times in my life. And I’ll admit, it works. I can’t say I hate it as much as I used to.
Let that sink into your head —
The mere act of repeatedly eating something can cause your brain to start ignoring real, physical factors that make it taste bad.
What does Broccoli have to do with Iron Man blasting aliens out of the sky? Familiarity.
“To be remembered, be repetitive” — Dale Carnegie
In the 1940s, Americans bought close to 30 movie tickets a year. These days, it’s about 4. To avoid going out of business, studios have resorted to creating safe, familiar content that will guarantee the return of film-goers, and they do this by making their characters more familiar.
Marvel Studios is a perfect example of this. By weaving together familiar faces and vast storylines, they’ve created a cinematic universe that has hooked millions.
The secret is literally just repetition. Repetition creates familiarity, and people like things that are familiar.
Introducing a new character? Throw in some fan favourites along them and you have a blockbuster success.
Want to ensure that fans will return? Get people used to a cliffhanger at the end of every movie to leave them agonising the next steps of the story for months.
People are naturally drawn to faces they already know, and when you’ve seen your favorite superhero for years on screen, you’re definitely watching their new movie instead of the arthouse film that released last week.
If it sounds formulaic, that’s because it is. “But eventually”, you think, “won’t fans get bored of the same stuff repeating over and over again?”
But then I’d say, you haven’t heard of the mice and the music.
Formulas that work
David Huron, an esteemed professor at Ohio State University, likes scaring mice. Well, not really, but he did conduct a study to see how long it would take for mice to get used to a musical note.
Here’s an explanation from Derek Thompson’s book Hit Makers-
Take a mouse and play a loud noise- call it B. The mouse will freeze…. Play B again and he will be adorably startled. But eventually the mouse will stop reacting. The noise will no longer interest him.
This is the same reaction we would have if Marvel kept churning out movies with the same formula again and again- eventually, we’d be bored. To keep us on our feet, we need to be introduced to something new.
The researchers mimicked this by introducing a new sound — C
The moment the C is played, the mouse forgets a bit about the previous B note, which means that you can reintroduce it later without being boring. Eventually, it will get bored of both the B and the C, at which point the scientists introduced a third sound D.
Eventually, they found an optimal general pattern to keep mice scared for the longest period of time (poor mouse)
BBBBC-BBBC-BBC-BC-D
As Derek Thompson realised, that last section, the BBC-BC-D, is the same as “the most common pattern in the last fifty years of pop music” — verse verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge.
And if a formula can keep people interested in sounds, it can definitely keep people interested in movies. You just need to introduce something new every once in a while to keep your audience interested.
To create products that people love, you need to balance neophilia, the love of new things, and neophobia, the resistance to too much change.
There’s no better example than their ability to do so than their latest movie. For those who watched it, (no spoilers for those who didn’t) Infinity War brought together 19 movies worth of characters and pitted them against a villain that they’ve been building up for years, and ended the movie in a way absolutely no one expected.
This aspect of keeping audiences familiar with products but at the same time creating new ones to keep them on their feet was give a name by the great American designer Raymond Loewy, he called it MAYA — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
It means that to create things that people love, you need to balance neophilia, the love of new things, and neophobia, the resistance to too much change.
Conclusion
Being creative isn’t easy, but there are specific methods all creatives can use to get their art to sell better.
If you want work that sells, remember these three points:
- Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people
- The secret is literally just repetition. Repetition creates familiarity, and people like things that are familiar.
- To create things that people love, you need to balance neophilia, the love of new things, and neophobia, the resistance to too much change. (Remember MAYA — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable)
Thanks for reading,
Sarvasv
