Capes, Tights, and Motherships

Superheroes have become an extremely profitable form of intellectual property. This has prompted observers, such as Ben Metcalf and Stephen Fritz, to suggest that they have supplanted Hollywood’s traditional use of star power as the pre-sold capital that gets movies made and draws in large audiences. This chapter interrogates this claim by examining how superheroes, as intellectual property, function as a parallel of the traditional Hollywood star system and enable a range of new transmedia strategies that leverage the superhero’s ability to have multiple iterations simultaneously available. In contrast to the monopoly value which powered the Hollywood star system, the superhero star system could be seen to be powered by Gerard Genette’s concept of the threshold. Taking the youth-focused Marvel Rising franchise as case study, the chapter analyses how a hierarchy of transmedia systems operate to cultivate pre-sold interest in key demographics, providing multiple consumer entry-points and potential thresholds for lesser-known or marginal superhero characters to become the next drivers of the mothership.