What is it that intrigues someone to ask during a comic-con panel, “Could you possibly comment on the connection between say… The Avengers and Super Mario?…”

The cast of your favourite Film or TV show would then probably just give you the cold stare and refuse to comment.
You can’t possibly expect a satisfying answer but you’ll ask anyway in hope that just a smidge of information will be revealed.

But why do the fans ask?… Why do you ask?

And why am I repeating myself yet again?

Well, for those of you who read my previous article on The Lure of Crossovers, you’ll probably remember I didn’t quite answer the titular question.

Not at all really.

So allow me to cease with the trolling and clear up the abrupt lack of clarity.
And let me use a prominent movie universe as the centre piece for this article – The infamous MCU…

By now, after going strong for over a decade and in the wake up the upcoming Avengers: Endgame, many eager fans are hell bent on catching up with all the little details they’ve missed thus far that could connect the dots and enlighten their knowledge of the glorious MCU.

After Iron Man became a hit in 2008, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America soon followed like a storm in the wind.
And in the aftermath came a crossover that would spark the fandom into a frenzy.

Marvel’s Avengers Assemble introduced mainstream film audiences to The Crossover for the first time in a very very long time.

Sure, there had been many crossovers in various other mediums – In TV shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its spin off Angel, in Video Games with the Mario and the Final Fantasy franchises and, with far too many examples to name, within literature as well.

And just to point out, the very first crossover came to the big screen in 1943 in the form of ‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’. That’s over three generations of crossovers that have enriched and broadened cinematic universes.

These cinematic universes have also ignited a passion within the fandom to question everything they see in movies. They’ve become obsessed with looking for small tidbits of information that could tie one movie to another.

You can see this craze in the way moviegoers now obsess over post-credit scenes.
It’s a courteous way, I suppose, for audiences to sit and appreciate a film’s credit sequence.
Now they can sit and appreciate the thousands of man-hours that went into the making of a film.

Most recently, with Captain Marvel being the preceding movie to Avengers Endgame, fans got to marvel at – no pun intended – an extended post-credit sequence that looked like it actually came from the forthcoming movie.

So you see, it seems crossovers have given way to a whole bundle of emotions that fans of cinematic universes can now thrive off of.
Chiefly among them is pure, unmitigated excitement…

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