Back in seminary, I talked my Old Testament professor into taking our entire class to go see The Avengers.

It was a week-long intensive, and I made my case in a ten-page paper on what the Avengers teach us about Old Testament characters. Ten pages. To get out of a classroom and into a movie theater on a Friday afternoon.

He approved it. The whole cohort went.

So I wanted in on that story badly enough to do homework for the privilege, which, it turns out, is the entire business model.

Saturday night in San Diego, everyone walking into Hall H found a silver Doctor Doom mask and a green cape waiting on their seat. (Roughly 7,000 of them, if you trust the mask count over the fire marshal.)

Marvel's most crowded Comic-Con panel ever closed with the entire Avengers cast (Evans, Pascal, Rudd, all of them) turning to take one giant selfie with the crowd. Then Robert Downey Jr. took the mic as Doctor Doom, the masks went on, and the whole hall turned green.

RDJ looked out at 7,000 copies of his own face and said, "It's not easy being green."

(The MCU's new big bad opened with a Kermit the Frog quote. You can’t make this stuff up)

There was no news in that reveal. Not a frame of it. Downey's Doom casting was announced two years ago at this same panel. Every person in that room already knew he was Doom.

Marvel had nothing to announce, so it staged something else….

The timing mattered too. Monday's trailer pulled 503 million views in 24 hours, a Disney record, and still spent the week getting dragged; the loudest complaint was that the VFX looked like AI slop.

Record reach, contested taste.

So Marvel answered an AI-slop complaint with a few dollars of vacuum-formed plastic, and it worked. The Hollywood Reporter, which had called the trailer reaction "not enthusiastic" on Monday, wrote by the weekend that the panel "demolished any negativity from days prior."

Turns out it's hard to trash a movie while you're wearing its villain's face.

A generation raised on games doesn't want to watch stories anymore. They want to participate in them. That's the whole rise of cosplay, and escape rooms, and virtual reality getting funded round after round even though the headsets are heavy and everybody looks ridiculous wearing one; people will put up with a lot for the feeling of being inside the thing instead of parked in front of it.

Studios keep answering that by making more to consume, and the audience keeps asking for a part to play. Marvel listened.

The mask does it for a couple of bucks (7,000x over). A trailer gets watched once and forgotten in the avalanche of content; a mask gets worn, posted, and carried home in a backpack. Every phone in that hall ended up pointed at other people wearing one, which means Marvel got a full news cycle by costuming 7,000 correspondents.

None of it was luck.

The Doom costume appeared in Marvel's booth hours before the panel to prime the room, and the mask itself is a real Jazwares product headed to shelves. The prop keeps marketing long after everyone flies home.

Fair pushback: Marvel also announced Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider and a third Black Panther that afternoon, so you could argue the news carried the panel and the masks were set dressing.

This is one of the reasons I love a more traditional church service. Palm branches get handed out on Palm Sunday. Communion goes in my actual hands every week, and there is something about the feel of it and the taste of it that a beautifully written explanation of it has never once accomplished for me.

An object that hands you a role is the oldest engagement design on earth, and your people already know it by muscle memory.

It isn't only a liturgical thing. It's sitting in the middle of nearly every good marketing campaign.

Years ago I ran a video series called Roll for Verse. I'd roll a d20 until it landed on a random verse, then do a five-minute study on whatever came up.

When people commented, I mailed them a sticker. Just the words Roll for Verse, a couple of cents to print.

They started mailing me dice. Real ones, twenty-dollar sets, because they wanted to watch their dice roll on screen and hear their name when it happened.

I sent out pennies of plastic and got back gifts, mail, and a bunch of people who were suddenly co-hosting the show with me. The sticker gave people a way to be in it.

The move:

Bottom Line: When you have no news to give people, give them a costume.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️