There’s a minor moment in Thor: Ragnarok, the 17th installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that only lands if fans are able to recall a movie that came out five years and 11 movies ago. “Yesssssss,” Tom Hiddleston’s Loki screams as Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk tosses Chris Hemsworth’s Thor around like a rag doll. “That’s what it feels like!” It’s a reference to a popular (GIF-able) beat in the final act of 2012’s The Avengers where Hulk gives Loki the same rag-doll treatment.

It’s no great gamble to slide something quick like that into Ragnarok—the few viewers who don’t get it will quickly move on to the next Hulking smash. But Marvel can also assume that a lot of its audience will get the joke. Not just because The Avengers pulled in over $1.5 billion at the box office worldwide, but because of what Marvel studio chief Kevin Feige calls the high “at-home re-playability” quality of every Marvel movie. Even as superhero films remain the last great big-screen hope, one of the few genres that still regularly pulls audiences into theaters, Marvel has minted its success thanks in part to the small screen. From throwaway jokes to emotional climaxes that rely on three films of back story to land (just look at the “He’s my friend” moment in Captain America: Civil War), the deeply serialized Marvel universe is leaning on the kind of complex storytelling that has defined the current era of Peak TV.

The confluence of film and television can be a particularly sore subject with the critical community–just look at what happened when David Lynch’s 18-episode Twin Peaks: The Return landed a top spot in Sight and Sound’s Best Films of 2017 list this week. Prominent TV critics poured out their frustrations on Twitter arguing that, despite premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, Twin Peaks, cannot be a movie. But can a movie franchise be TV? It starts, with the Marvel films, in the literal first frame, with the studio’s recognizable logo. Lucasfilm restrains itself to a refined 11-second gleam. Walt Disney gives brief variations on magic-castle animations. But the Marvel Studios logo, which like any has morphed over time, has become a sprawling 30-second affair, with Brian Tyler’s, and, later, Michael Giacchino’s theme song playing over it. The logo acts just like the opening credits of a beloved show, with all your favorite character’s faces on display. “The studios started to see that that logo in front of a movie got applause,“ former studio head Avi Arad says. “Usually, logos don’t get applause, but because it was cleverly designed to be like pieces of a comic book, it just put you in the right mind.” An abbreviated version even had a prime spot in the recent Infinity War trailer.

For all their differences, a Marvel film always starts with that opening credits-esque intro and ends with a mid or post-credits scene preview, a “next time on” look ahead that ensures audiences will come back for more. And they know, to some extent, what they’ll be getting. “No one says I’m going to buy a book and name the bookstore,” Arad observes. “In our case, it became ‘I’m going to see a Marvel movie tonight.’ It’s quite unusual—reserved for Disney, for Pixar. Usually, people don’t name the company that makes it.”

Joe Russo and Anthony Russo. Photograph by Jason Bell.

There’s a story Joe Russo is fond of telling—Feige chuckled with familiarity when I brought it up—to underline the difference between “movie-star” famous and “TV” famous. George Clooney and Brad Pitt were walking through an airport during the Ocean’s Eleven era—Clooney was mobbed by fans asking for photos and autographs while Pitt was left entirely alone. “George was a TV star and people had spent time with him in their living room for many years,” Russo explains. “So they felt like they knew him on a personal level. Brad was like a movie-star god. So there’s a different relationship, psychologically.” The Marvel stars, familiar to audiences for playing the same characters, in some cases, for a decade now? They’re TV famous.