Critical Media Studies, 3rd Edition

Appendix: Sample Student Essays

Marxist Analysis

Jackson De Vight

When the original Iron Man film debuted in 2008, Disney – while a powerful media conglomerate – was far from the titanic juggernaut it is today. Income was on the upswing, with the company’s amusement parks and network holdings trending upwards, but the studio entertainment and consumer product divisions were largely static in the early 2000s. Ambitious plans for capitalizing on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) generated a drastic shift in that trend. Even amidst the financial collapse besetting the rest of the US economy, the company’s foray into Marvel intellectual property would help catapult Disney into unquestioned dominance over the next decade. Products from the MCU find their way across nearly every possible medium, from conventional magazines and videogames to social media and exclusive TV series created for the streaming service Netflix. I argue that the MCU is an instantiation of the logics of safety and synergy for the Walt Disney Company as understood through the Marxist materialist lens.

The imperative in business to avoid risk by mimicking patterns of past success to guide future decisions lies at the heart of the logic of safety (Ott and Mack, 2014, p. 40). The Marvel property is a perfect demonstration of how this plays out. When Disney first considered making a foray into Marvel films, the track‐record for successful films of that variety was questionable at best. So, a financially plateauing ...