Could Dune's Worldbuilding Save Marvel?

Once upon a time, I was obsessed with Marvel - my cat Loki is proof enough of that. But that time was so long ago that I barely remember it anymore, because let’s be real, Marvel sucks now. Every movie is the same copy-paste sludge of content. It’s not even entertainment, just content. Worse yet, it sells, so now half of the big movies just follow the same bland formula. It’s gotten so bad that I expect every new blockbuster to be the same mediocre nothingness.

Until Dune : Part Two came along.

To be fair, I didn’t expect much of Dune either. At first, I assumed it would be as slow and convoluted as the first installment. When it started getting tons of praise, though, I assumed it had copied Marvel’s approach for the sake of boring “broad appeal”. When I actually sat down and watched it, though, I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised - it was almost revolutionary for me as a writer, all thanks to its worldbuilding.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term… can’t you tell what it means just by reading it? It’s the way a fantasy story builds its fictional world. The term covers a lot : creating conlangs, plotting out complex economic systems, and even just drawing a world maps. Not all worldbuilding is done the same, and it’s not always done well, but when it is… Let’s just say Dune showed me how good worldbuilding forces even the blandest content to become meaningful.

Any fictional setting will have people, and people naturally split into groups with different values. These could be cultures in a world, factions in a city, or even just cliques in a high school. Regardless, once they know who the groups are, a good worldbuilder will ask how their values shape their lives and how their lives shape their values.

Take the Fremen as an example. They live in a harsh desert climate, so they value the community and resilience needed to survive in that world. The desert also contains Spice, a resource coveted throughout the universe. As a result, other cultures come to subjugate or exterminate the Fremen to control the Spice - this then changes how Fremen view outsiders. Their religion, however, leads them not only to accept an outsider but to raise him to the status of messiah. That messiah might actually be a plant, though, and might just lead the Fremen into war for the sake of revenge.

I can’t break down the worldbuilding too much without just rewriting Dune, but just that one paragraph poses many philosophical questions that make the story feel worthwhile. The audience has to consider the role of religion in society, the power dynamics of messiah/followers and coloniser/colonised, the desire for wealth at any cost, the use of revenge… There are already endless paths to explore in the story. Dune : Part Two focuses particularly on the religious aspects, and it deserves a lot of praise for it. Not only does it take on one of the most culturally sensitive topics possible, it’s done well. Thanks to that added depth, the film is more than just entertaining, it’s worth talking about.

So how could this kind of worldbuilding save Marvel? By making the films actually mean something again. Early Marvel films had enough meaning to interest the audience, but they were too character-focused. Iron Man is about the glories and dangers of technology. Captain America is about the power of bravery and resolve. Thor, after struggling to find its footing, finally became a story about finding strength in oneself and growing up. What the heck is Doctor Strange about, though? And how do you manage all these individual meanings when you’re trying to build a cinematic universe?

Marvel needed easy hits in the beginning, so the simple character focus makes sense. If it wants to keep its reputation, though, it needs to create an interesting world. Wakanda was a good start, but we need more. In Marvel’s world, cities are destroyed every other week - maybe that means people start fleeing the city to live in the countryside. Maybe economies start to collapse as a result, and superheroes are called in to act as permanent “police” for the city. Maybe people are unfairly arrested to make a show of safety and opinion turns against superheroes. Maybe people don’t return to the cities because they prefer living in the country and the government becomes more authoritarian to try to keep control.

Questions of crime and punishment, rural and urban life, government’s role in society… there’s so much to explore already. It would take a lot of creativity, and it means Marvel would actually have to stand for something for once, but isn’t that the whole point of making art in the first place? In Marvel’s profit-driven world, probaly not - but maybe someday. After all, Dune is a reminder that worldbuilding-heavy, meaningful stories can be big hits too, and what’s more convincing to major studios than dollar signs?