Marvel / Warner Bros.
Okay, first off, I can already hear every single one of you saying Marvel movies are liked more than DC Comics films because, duh, they’re just better. I absolutely do not disagree with that very hot take you have there, friend.
If I were to name my top ten favorite comic book slash superhero movies the only DC Comics film in the top 10 would be Wonder Woman. Heck, even the non-Marvel Studios films like Logan, the Spider-Man movies and some of the X-Men films are superior to almost all of the DC Extended Movie Universe.
The question is, what SPECIFICALLY are the things that Marvel is doing right with their movies that DC Comics is continuously doing wrong?
That’s where a unique new study was undertaken by automated market research tech provider ZappiStore comes into play. According to their findings, the success of Marvel is linked to the audience’s emotional engagement with their superheroes.
AdWeek reports on how ZappiStore came to their conclusions…
ZappiStore was able to test a viewer’s emotional engagement with a series of Marvel and DC movie trailers by using a facial coding and emotion recognition platform called Affectiva.
The respondents participating in the Marvel/DC study, and others like it, only need internet connectivity and a standard web camera. As viewers watch stimulus, Affectiva can measure their moment-by-moment facial expressions of emotions. The results for this study were aggregated and displayed in a dashboard.
ZappiStore reports that viewed reacted well to the DC trailers’ special effects and explosive action, but not so much to the actual characters. Meanwhile, Marvel’s characters and the humor displayed in their trailers created higher levels of emotional engagement, i.e. how well the trailer grabbed their attention, and how likely they were to share it with others on social media.
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Marvel trailers also index higher on the “brand linkage” score (how well they fit with a respondent’s image of the comics), indicating that inconsistent DC character connections could be having a negative effect on the audience’s emotional engagement with its trailers.
Marvel has created a consistency with their characters that DC Comics lacks. Their “brand affinity and character connection” creates a higher level of emotional engagement, which is why the Marvel trailers consistently beat DC in both this test, as well as, one can assume, at the box office.
“We were surprised to see, across all trailers tested, that the emotional response was lower than expected for set pieces and special effects, particularly in the genre we were looking at,” ZappiStore research architect Ernie Collings said. “The results indicate the way DC can reboot and change characters across trilogies or between TV to film might be having a detrimental effect on how well the public connects with those characters.”
So, there you go, DC. Less blowing stuff up, and more character development. Throwing in a joke or two wouldn’t hurt either. There’s a reason Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn was so popular and it wasn’t just all about her skimpy outfit.