All the major studios have attempted to follow the gold-brick road: some directly, with superhero franchises of their own, such as Warner’s DCEU and Sony’s freshly renamed SPUMC, and some tangentially, by creating an interconnected universe of recurring characters to draw on, or by applying the Marvel format to films that used to be run-of-the-mill action flicks. Over the past decade, the unprecedented box-office takings for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe films have ensured that blockbuster cinema has almost exclusively become the domain of the superhero.
