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.”

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.

Paul Rudd is reluctant, at first, to consider the Marvel Cinematic Universe in television terms—“Just the budgets alone!” But even he can’t help thinking of himself as a TV guest star. Whenever his character Ant-Man shows up alongside franchise mainstays Iron Man, Captain America, or Black Widow, Rudd says he feels like Cousin Oliver—the blond and bespectacled late-in-the-series addition to The Brady Bunch. “I had a little bit of an experience like that on the last couple seasons of Friends,” says Rudd, who, despite marrying Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe, never rose above peripheral, guest-star status. “I just don’t want to get in the way.” By that logic, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange just had a scene-stealing guest spot in Thor: Ragnarok.

Chris Hemsworth, who got his start as a soap star in Australia and knows a thing or two about being TV famous, agrees that fans treat him and his co-stars with that same “I’ve watched you for years” familiarity. “They see you as your character. The fact that they’ve watched that film five or six times—there’s ownership over that character. You see a brilliant, Oscar-winning performance once you don’t necessarily watch it again, so you don’t have the comfort of running up to them and asking for a selfie.” Nicole Kidman said something similar just after winning an Emmy for her work on HBO’s Big Little Lies this year. Being in people’s homes every week, the Oscar-winner argued, was much more intimate of a connection.

Marvel didn’t invent the concept of the franchise—Mickey Rooney was Andy Hardy and Johnny Weissmuller was Tarzan long before anyone asked Thor for a selfie. But there’s something more deeply televisual and serialized about the work Marvel is doing inspired, as they are, by the interwoven, crossover format of comic books themselves. Nowhere is that more apparent than when Kevin Feige talks about the plans he has to bring this chapter of Marvel Studios to a close in 2019 with the franchise’s 22nd film, currently titled Avengers 4. (Twenty-two, for what it’s worth, was once the golden number of episodes for a season of network television.)

“Great television series do that all the time,” Feige said of this quasi-series finale for Marvel. “That can be some of the best—when done well—some of the best episodes of the whole thing. We thought it would be fun to do that.” Feige grew up dreaming of making movies, but admits that as a kid the “TV raised me, in many ways.” In fact, Feige’s first foray into filmed storytelling was through a TV production course at his high school.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who at this point are the closest thing Marvel has to in-house directors, have even more history with television; they got their start directing multiple episodes of Arrested Development, Happy Endings, and Community before joining up with Marvel for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But they’re more hesitant than Feige to think of Avengers 4 as a TV finale, thinking of it more as a massive crossover event, like when Laverne and Shirley used to visit the gang on Happy Days. “The equivalency,” Anthony Russo says, “would be that somebody had 10 shows on the air with different characters, and then they decided to create a narrative strain that involved all those characters.” Avengers 4, Joe Russo points out, has a cast so massive that Oscar winners are appearing as “day players.”

The Russos’ background in directing episodic TV under the direction of a single show-runner, may be why Kevin Feige says the brothers “happen to be the best at being on our same wavelength.” In the case of Marvel the show-runner, naturally, is Feige himself. The same can be said for the role of Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm who is responsible for ensuring her multi-episode saga, Star Wars, doesn’t go off the rails. The lack of a studio franchise “show-runner” like Feige or Kennedy—someone with clear vision who is unafraid to make tough decisions—is likely why other would-be serialized franchises—at Universal, until recently at Warner Bros., etc.—can’t seem to get off the ground. But as Kennedy and Feige have both learned firsthand, not every director can work in such a system.

Eager for TV comparisons or not, the Russos are excited about the long-form stories they’re telling about the Avengers. “Movies, for 100 years, were a two-dimensional experience—they’re about two-hours long,” Anthony says. Joe Russo adds: “How many more times can you go into a movie theater and know, 10 minutes into the movie, what’s gonna happen in 90 minutes of the movie? As a fan, I’m bored of content. I’m looking for new ways to structure things. I want somebody to try and tell a story with 60 characters that’s like a staggeringly ambitious mosaic over 10 years. I’m excited by those things.”

Anthony Russo concedes this shake-up in narrative storytelling is what has made those 10-hour seasons of Netflix—consumed by some viewers over the course of a weekend—so enormously popular. “People are freaking out because they, at their leisure, can watch 10 hours of material and live with those characters for 10 hours. And I think that’s the real challenge to the movie business. That’s why things are changing and why it’s so disruptive right now is people are looking for new forms of storytelling.”

Joe Russo has a cool assessment of the current state of commercial, big-budget filmmaking that Netflix, Marvel, and plenty of others are aiming to challenge. There’s one season, February through August, dominated by “remakes” and “regurgitations” of intellectual property. Then there’s awards season or, as he puts it, “here comes the 10 directors who can get a movie released between September and December, who in a lot of ways, even though they’re artistic, are still doing a ‘greatest hits’ of what they’ve been doing for the last 10, or 15, or 20 years. I’m looking for something different.”

But Russo is also sympathetic to the way the dominance of Marvel has annoyed some in the critical community. “I understand that if you got into film criticism because you grew up on foreign films and you’re watching these massive commercial I.P. movies dominate the space and your job every week is to go see the next piece of I.P. that’s being refurbished or the next installment and that’s not your thing, that could be disheartening to you.” But both brothers also firmly believe that what they and Feige are doing, turning two-hour movies into a 10-years-plus yarn, is the kind of disruption that deserves celebration—and the only thing that will allow the movies to continue competing with television. The ambitious, upcoming Avengers installments, Anthony Russo explains, “Create a social conversation that you have to be a part of the minute the movie comes out. And if it doesn’t, then you can watch content on your phone or your Apple TV and you do not have to get in your car, and hire a babysitter, and spend a lot of money to go to the movies.” Marvel, he believes, is either going to get credit for shifting the way we think about movies, or it will continue to shoulder the blame.

Robert Downey Jr., industry veteran and Marvel’s first star, is as susceptible as anyone to the alluring pull of binge-able TV: “Everything I’m watching I’m watching after hours. It’s downloaded, and I’m watching 10 or 12 hours of something that I had no idea existed before.” In that way, he argues, the Marvel movies can’t just be serialized, “must-see” TV, they have to be event-ized television as well. Is the unprecedented one-two punch of Avengers 3 and 4 that kind of event? “I guess so,” Downey says. “I don’t know if we can afford to make it otherwise.”

But while some of Marvel’s players still feel conflicted over comparing 22 movies to a season of TV, their leader, Kevin Feige, is unruffled. “I think if you’d asked me that question seven years ago, we’d go, ‘Well no, no. This isn’t television. We’re making movies.’ Look at television today. Television’s astounding today. We’d be lucky—be proud to be alongside the best of what’s happening in TV.”