>Marvel works because of the endless nerd wrangling in the comics world imposing narrative discipline and critical standards. Plus the crappy stories don't make it to the big screen. Star Wars just doesn't have that: it's a cathedral and there's no bishop, vs. the much more bazaar and bizarre comic book processes.
Good point.
For non-comic book readers, Marvel has published dozens of issues of various titles *every single month* since 1961. Those stories (plus selected issues from the late 1930s to 1961) are the gigantic mine of ideas that the MCU draws upon. Not all the stories are good, of course, but there have been six decades for public sentiment to manifest and identify the best/coolest/funniest/most touching moments, characters, and—well—memeable points. The memorable way a villain redeems himself at the end of the third Thor film? That's straight out of the comics.
Star Wars had a corpus of its own to draw upon, the Expanded Universe of novels/TV shows/comics/toys/etc. Zahn's Thrawn novel trilogy basically saved the franchise in the early 1990s, after the first set of movies ended with nothing else in sight. I've not read them, but fans have gushed over them ever since and I presume that they could have made a good set of post-RoTJ films. Disney explicitly disavowed the Expanded Universe after acquiring Lucasfilm, but recently published another Thrawn trilogy to bring the super-popular villain into mainstream continuity. But instead of anything like that, we got the sequel trilogy, with the dubious accomplishment of turning the $2 billion box office of the first film into $1 billion for the third.
Good point.
For non-comic book readers, Marvel has published dozens of issues of various titles *every single month* since 1961. Those stories (plus selected issues from the late 1930s to 1961) are the gigantic mine of ideas that the MCU draws upon. Not all the stories are good, of course, but there have been six decades for public sentiment to manifest and identify the best/coolest/funniest/most touching moments, characters, and—well—memeable points. The memorable way a villain redeems himself at the end of the third Thor film? That's straight out of the comics.
Star Wars had a corpus of its own to draw upon, the Expanded Universe of novels/TV shows/comics/toys/etc. Zahn's Thrawn novel trilogy basically saved the franchise in the early 1990s, after the first set of movies ended with nothing else in sight. I've not read them, but fans have gushed over them ever since and I presume that they could have made a good set of post-RoTJ films. Disney explicitly disavowed the Expanded Universe after acquiring Lucasfilm, but recently published another Thrawn trilogy to bring the super-popular villain into mainstream continuity. But instead of anything like that, we got the sequel trilogy, with the dubious accomplishment of turning the $2 billion box office of the first film into $1 billion for the third.