With Marvel, things are different. It's not only that Marvel's movies share an aesthetic so that the different installments don't just become consistent, but virtually interchangeable — it's that, as of Ant-Man, Marvel has literally made their products interchangeable. The post-credit sequence of Ant-Man, after all, was actually part of Captain America: Civil War that was imported into the former movie at the last minute in order to remind viewers that Ant-Man was definitely, 100 percent, connected to all those other Marvel movies that they knew and loved.

The wholesale, uncredited lift of a scene from one movie into another is the most extreme example of Marvel's willingness to keep the authorship of its movies fluid; post-credit sequences of movies have long been directed by directors other than those responsible for the main movie — something that Thor: The Dark World's Alan Taylor complained about in 2013 — and just this past week, James Gunn has talked about directing the Stan Lee cameo sequences for at least three Marvel movies, underscoring the fact that multiple directors work, often uncredited, on each Marvel movie.

Directing a Marvel movie is, some have argued, more akin to directing a television show, where the focus is on serving the vision of the writers or producers (in this case, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige). There's a case to be made for that, although it would be difficult to argue that writers get much more respect in the Marvel movie method. Ant-Man writer/director Peyton Reed admitting that he was upset that Scott Lang's "Giant Man" power reveal would happen in Captain America: Civil War comes to mind here; again, the greater whole prevails over the individual movie, or the artist responsible.

So who is the author of a Marvel movie, if not the writer or the director? It's tempting to make the case for the Marvel brand itself. It's the name that audiences identify the movies with as a whole, and it's the name that has come to define expectations for subsequent movies. We know what to expect from a Marvel movie, and we grade each new release against the Marvel movies that came before. In many ways, the Marvel brand is the most successful creation of Marvel Studios to date, achieving in less than a decade what took Pixar, Disney et al far longer to cement in the minds of their fan base.

To date, other studios that would rival Marvel haven't followed its lead on this issue. Warner Bros' Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is clearly a Zack Snyder movie, distinct from David Ayer's Suicide Squad and, from what we've seen so far, Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman. Even Lucasfilm's Star Wars: The Force Awakens was obviously the work of J.J. Abrams. But what happens when studios notice how successful Marvel had become by submerging individual voices in service of the unified studio vision …?