When we meet Hiddleston has recently finished filming Avengers: Doomsday, picking up from the “glorious purpose” that Loki found at the end of season two. “My contribution has been contributed,” he says of the forthcoming film. And then, slightly less evasively: " It is monumental. The centre of the story is absolutely brilliant, and was so surprising when I read it. It just has never been done before."
the dark tower is one of the films in the universe, others include IT, the Stand, Pet Sematary, etc.
There are ~15 movies based on Lovecrafts works, and more influenced by…
with respect, I find your definition of what a universe is pretty arbitrary. The MCU movies don’t have a single writer, director, Auteur etc either.
Mimic is talking about cinematic universes. These are things that could technically be brands unto themselves with different themes and genres, but then you take them and combine them. They aren’t just shared, but living and breathing.
No Stephen king universe stuff has come together to form a mashup of all of those. Yes, they reference/share, but that’s totally different.
Lovecraft? Once again, same principle.
Captain America has his own movies with a history and political theme. Iron Man has tech and politics. Hulk is a monster vs man. Thor is fantasy and mythology. You could literally have these heroes never interact, but they do on multiple occasions!
They can each have, and do have, their own complete movies and arcs while also having things that affect the other’s movies while also having them come together to confront larger problems and then going back on their separate ways. None of what you referenced before are cinematic universes.
They are universes, yes, but you don’t have the entirety of Lovecraft come together to fight Cthulu or something. It’s not like Original Trek, Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, etc all work on their own missions then team up for a big confrontation or issue and then go back to their own stuff on screen. Star Wars all share the universe, but you don’t have multiple entities really doing things in the same timeline on their own and then come together. They contain arcs and different entities in the universe. The closest we may have come is Clone Wars/Rebels/Bad Batch and the Mando and Grogu stuff but even then these happen at different times and not simultaneously.
I still maintain, “the protagonists of every connected story must engage in hand to hand combat with a single antagonist at one point in the story simultaneously” to be a pretty unsatisfactory description of an oeuvre, I also am unconvinced that both “cinematic” and “universe” only applies to movies based on comic books - and Marvel even breaks this definition by having Marvel tv shows.
The TV shows are connected, though. Things that happen in them affect the movies and vice versa.
Living. And. Breathing.
Same for Stephen Kings works. In fact Doctor Doom - or an analog thereof - also appears in The Dark Tower.