Would the Marvel cinematic universe as we know it be where it is today had Thor not taken off?
As one of the Marvel cinematic universe's baddies described it, we live in an age of miracles. Marvel Studios has dominated the superhero movie market by launching hit after hit, to the point where the second Avengers movie will likely break a billion in the next couple of weeks.
As Fast & Furious 7 recently showed us, the road to the top ten highest grossing films at the worldwide box office really is that fast these days, and Avengers: Age Of Ultron is already tracking to open bigger than The Avengers' record-holding $207 million opening weekend in 2012 when it lands in the US later this week. The only film that stands to make more money this year is Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Or maybe Minions.
Marvel have barely put a foot wrong in terms of quality, but it's been a phenomenal seven year run for a studio that started out independently of the major players. There were a couple of points where the box office might have gone awry and that's one of the reasons why we'd argue that the pivotal film in all of this was Thor.
We might not have gotten here if The Avengers had unexpectedly flopped hard in 2012 and maybe there'd even be whispers of discord if last year's Guardians Of The Galaxy hadn't found such a warm reception, but Thor is the one film that might have undone all of this if it hadn't hit so big.
While 2008's Iron Man laid the first paving stone on the path to The Avengers, Marvel was still looking for a second hit when 2011 rolled around. The same summer as Iron Man, Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk came out as part of a co-production deal with Universal and although it was more warmly received than the previous 2003 version, that didn't translate into a box office smash.
On the other side of this, when Iron Man 2 came out in 2010, it was slated by critics as a slack and less enjoyable sequel, but it made even more than the first film. Three films deep, Iron Man was still the only Marvel movie that hit both critically and financially.
Post-Guardians Of The Galaxy, Thor doesn't look like that much of a gamble, but then it's doubtful we ever would have got a Guardians film if it hadn't proven what Marvel could do. The operative part of the MCU is that it's a Universe and Thor shook off the grounded approach to Iron Man in order to explore other realms. They also had the challenge of adapting a character who had been subject to various different interpretations in the comics since he was created in 1962.
To quote our own review from the time: “When so many elements of the character actively resist a cinematic take, it makes sense for director Kenneth Branagh and his team to have pulled together several interpretations of the character for the screen interpretation. In doing so, they might actually have created the definitive version of Thor.”
Marvel's Phase One films were designed to make a shared continuity for the characters whose rights the company had retained and on paper, Thor was by far the riskiest proposition on the slate. Branagh's success in making an epic adventure story with both Shakespearean and farcical qualities paid off massively, and proved that Iron Man was no fluke.
Had it flopped, then we probably wouldn't have got a Thor sequel - that much is obvious. But Marvel already had The Avengers in the pipeline within a year of Thor, with Loki carrying over as the main villain. If Thor hadn't worked so well, they already would have been elbow deep in a sequel in which its characters were central.
That's what really made it a gamble, of the kind which might still backfire on Warner Bros, who are already developing Justice League Part 1/2 before they've got a script nailed down for 2017's Wonder Woman. Heck, even Shazam, which is currently pencilled in for 2019, seems readier than about six of the films we'll supposedly get between now and then. If Wonder Woman comes together as well as Thor, then maybe we'll be writing a similar article about it in five years' time.
We're probably spoilt these days, if we can look back on The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 as Marvel's worst run thus far - neither of them are entirely without merit, although both seem compromised by what went on behind the scenes. If Thor had failed, Marvel would have been shaken early and shaken hard.
But given how brilliant and successful their output has been since, at a greatly accelerated rate of production, it's hard to deny that Thor was the real start of the Marvel cinematic universe as we know it - a film that's as funny as the first Iron Man, (funnier, even) while also upping the stakes and opening up the cosmos for everything that has followed.
