One of my favorite things in the current wave of superhero movies and tv shows is imagining how current news and pop culture would interpret superheroes. "In-Universe Marketing" can cover a lot of different content, but my favorite is the fake news.
The website https://mediavengers.tumblr.com collects different fake news articles about Marvel's Avengers and the photos are great! The Economist cover post Captain America: Winter Soldier is reminiscent to their coverage of other intelligence issues of the Bush and Obama era.
I also like the idea of InTouch having a series of fake covers about Hawkeye and Black Widow dating, as that is both what would happen and exactly what real fans speculated about!
Reference to Civil War:
If superheroes were real, people would definitely collect newspaper articles. But the real weird is weirder, and we have people who collect fake newspapers about superheroes. You can buy the Media Avengers reproductions on RedBubble. And some people actually get ahold of the real movie props:
When Amazon Prime made The Boys, I think the creators, especially Eric Kripke, fully understood people's interest in the real life media impact of superheroes which is why they made so much additional content. In addition to the news coverage within the tv show about superheroes, they also released "in-universe" trailers and music videos as uploaded by the fake superhero from the show.
Their fake channel even includes fake news:
While Marvel did do a music video, it's not like The Boys music videos which are all in character and all exist within universe. This Guardians of the Galaxy music video is just tongue-in-cheek fun for the cast with references to the comics and movies.
Personally, I much prefer the real in-universe music videos from The Boys than the DVD extras of Guardians of Galaxy. Marvel did do some in-house marketing for their Disney+ content!
While the Rogers Musical is quite divisive with fans, most The Boys fans can agree Starlight's song is an absolute hit.
Even though The Boys might have more content on their Youtube channel that is in-universe marketing than Marvel, the Disney property has more in-universe toys and content by virtue of their theme parks. Thankfully, no one has made The Boys into a real theme park (even if they may have one in the show).
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