Abstract
As two major superhero-movie production companies, DC and Marvel are easily confused and mixed up. Do they have distinctive styles or themes from each other? If yes, are they reflected by audiences' experience? This study explored the differences between Marvel and DC movies through text analysis of movie reviews. The results show significant differences between DC and Marvel movies based on their reviews: DC's movies have more serious and mysterious tones with diversity in their storylines and reviews, and Marvel's movies are more positive and inspirational with integrated and consecutive storylines.
Introduction
Along with the prevalence of superhero stories and the fast development of cinematic techniques, lots of excellent superhero movies have been presented to the audiences. Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and DC Extended Universe (DCEU) are the two chief media franchises that centered on superhero movies, which take up almost 80% (DC 33%, Marvel 42%) of the overall comic market
\citep{2017}. With thousands of characters from DC and Marvel, whose histories, super-powers, and storylines are more or less similar to each other, it could be quite confusing to distinguish between them. This study aims to explore the differences between DC and Marvel Movies from the audience perspectives. We implemented web crawler to collected movie reviews from
Rottentomatoes, a movie-review aggregation platform. We pre-processed the textual reviews, and applied multiple Natural language processing(NLP) methods, including term frequency analysis, classification models (Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forest), and topic models (Wordfish, LDA, STM) to identify the differences between DC and Marvel movies based on the review data.
Literature Review
The difference in DC & Marvel Superhero Movies
Marvel and DC as two giants in the superhero-based movie industry, competitions and debates have never ended between them. There are some existing studies comparing their movies from different perspectives. \citet{2014} argued in his article that a major reason Marvel has beat DC at the box office is that Marvel took time and patience when producing every movie, and DC tended to rush things out. \citet{2014a} 's study focused on the storylines of Marvel and DC Movies, and he concluded Marvel has done a greater job in maintaining continuity and flexibility of their stories, by allowing different superheroes exist in separate timelines and universes while still make sense when merging them together into one story and one world. DC, on the other hand, usually have their superheroes lived on own lives and had their own adventures. The lack of constancies and interconnections between stories also reduce the spreadability of DC movies. Another interesting study focuses on the arachnid-based characters of Marvel and DC was done by \citet{Da_Silva_2014}. The results show that Marvel has more arachnid characters (84) than DC (40) does, and most of the arachnid characters in DC are villains, which is corresponding to the “harmful” image of spiders, scorpions, and mites. However, there is no significant difference between the number of heroes and villains in Marvel arachnid characters, and this is because of Spider-Man’s success in Marvel according to the authors.
Inspired by these studies, we are interested in exploring the difference between the Marvel movies and DC movies from a different perspective – audiences. We are curious about whether the differences in audiences' experiences correspond to the actual difference between the movies.