Bredvig 60
available that revolves around the MCU. On Youtube.com, several channels frequently take time to
discuss, analyze, hypothesize, and suggest re-writes for MCU movies. These channels include, but
are not limited to, "Nando V. Movies", "WhatCulture", "Looper", "ScreenJunkies", "Lessons from
the screenplay", "Every Frame a Painting", "MovieBob", and "Geek.com". None of the mentioned
Youtube channels are exclusively about the MCU, but they do frequently feature content that revolves
around it. Additionally, while not all of the online content is laudatory of the MCU, these paratexts,
be they essays, fan-letters, thought experiments, critiques, reviews, or anything that falls in between,
still serve to create awareness of the MCU as well as an understanding of its breadth and scope. Bear
in mind, this is just the engagement created on Youtube, which is to say nothing of podcasts and other
websites featuring fan art, cosplay, news articles, and other online reviews. The MCU has likely also
reached critical mass in terms of consistently enjoying the benefits of word-of-mouth. Since, as Stork
points out, the team-up Avengers movies are the current pinnacle of Hollywood spectacle, any inter-
action with the demographics Marvel Studios is aiming (which, at this point, is quite a sizeable portion
of people) includes the possibility of hearing talk about the MCU. Therefore, when MCU movies
reference events that individual audience members have not seen, it is quite likely that they can cate-
gorize the information as something that is detailed elsewhere. In the best of cases (from a commercial
perspective), knowing that certain events are detailed elsewhere can spark interest and thereby create
incentive to catch-up. This amounts to a state where, even if audiences have not seen Doctor Strange
(Derrickson 2016), his appearance in Thor Ragnarok is less likely to cause confusion, because, on
some level, people are aware of the existence of Doctor Strange in the MCU.
Another cultural aspect the MCU has been the beneficiary of is a movie-going culture which
has shifted towards demanding more of the audience. Jenkins describes this as new Hollywood de-
manding, "[…] that we do research before we arrive in the theatre" (104). Part of this arises from
hard-core fans' ability to crowdsource information. As showrunner Damon Lindelof described when