Crossovers

Crossover Films are films where characters from two different franchises meet on screen or there is the implication that they live in a shared universe. Writers such as Philp Jose Farmer, Kim Newman and Alan Moore have created worlds on the printed page where numerous fictional characters meet, team up, are related or make cameo appearances.

The first screen work to conduct a crossover was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) where Universal Studios brought two of their in-house characters together on screen. For several years after, Universal made a series of adventures involving Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man. Similar meetings between the Famous Monsters have occurred in other works since from Van Helsing (2004) and tv’s Penny Dreadful (2014-6) to more comic offerings like the Hotel Transylvania films.

Toho had similar success when they brought Godzilla together to battle King Kong in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and thereafter pitted Godzilla against various other monsters they had created in standalone films.

Through the years we have had crossovers between franchises where the intellectual property has been held under the same roof such as Freddy vs Jason (2003), AVP: Alien vs Predator (2004), Sadako vs Kayako (2016) and Charles Band and Full Moon who regularly cross over their various creations. There have also been a surprising number of films showing that fairytale characters inhabit the same world.

Great success was had by Marvel Comics who first created an Easter Egg in The Incredible Hulk (2008) that led to the creation of a series of films introducing their various comic-book superheroes before all of them merged together and met on screen in The Avengers (2012). This blossomed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an elaborate interwoven shared continuity.

DC Comics did the same soon after. Other media franchises from Universal’s Dark Universe, Warner Brothers’ Monsterverse to Hanna-Barbera in Scoob! (2020) have sought to emulate the same with varying degrees of success.