Marvel, the comic book company, has built a theatrical empire.

Though, as I write this, I am impatiently awaiting the release of "Avengers: Infinity War", I know that as you read, it the movie will have been dominating the theaters for a week. The colossus of a film unites characters from 19 different movies filmed over ten years that exist in the same universe (the MCU) with so many characters that your head might spin off trying to keep track.

A film like this is unprecedented and some would have thought it unreasonable to make.

And, yet, Marvel has been the first to break ground that no one had or really has successfully even trod upon yet.

Back in 2008, when DC Films was still making the best superhero movies (only about Batman, but there were no complaints from me), Marvel released "Iron Man", with the charismatic and much-maligned Robert Downey Jr. in the starring role. It was very good: Downey Jr., the directing, the supporting cast (with actors like Terrance Howard, Gweneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges), and an excellent story came together to make a strong superhero film.

But most people didn't think it was anything more than the normal superhero series. It was one that was able to financially capitalize on a character that was arguably less mainstream than Batman or Spider-Man, but it was still just a normal superhero series.

Marvel continued to give us strong movies for the next few years — most notably, featuring Chris Evans' turn in the titular role of "Captain America: The First Avenger". But all this had been done before with different heroes. What came after that point... That was a spectacle we hadn't seen.

When Marvel released "The Avengers" in 2012, the movie industry would forever change. Never before had we seen separate movies so fluidly linked together with characters we had come to admire actually talking to one another on the screen. It was something of a child's fantasy, some of our favorite heroes getting the chance to work together (and against each other) on the big screen.

From there, the universe grew at an exponential rate, and Marvel (and now the Walt Disney Co.) are making an exorbitant amount of cash off of an absurd amount of successful properties. Not a single movie the studio created in said universe has gotten a "Rotten" score on Rotten Tomatoes' famed critics' "Tomatometer." With such critical and commercial success, the studio has built up enough credibility with moviegoers that it can even make (also absurd) money of off more obscure characters like the "Guardians of the Galaxy", "Ant-Man", and "Dr. Strange", turning them into pop culture icons as well.

We've already seen this impact rub off on the rest of Hollywood. DC Films, Universal Studios, and many others have tried and, to varying degrees, failed to pull off the same success that Marvel has created. In fact, Sony Pictures finally decided to allow Marvel to incorporate Spider-Man into their films after their planned "The Amazing Spider-Man" universe appeared to flop.

Marvel is, simply put, one-of-a-kind. This is coming from someone, by the way, who loves the characters of DC more than those of Marvel. This is coming from someone who is a die-hard Batman fan. When it comes to building a cinematic universe, there is no comparison to what Marvel has done, and there may never be.

If you think about all of these films as part of a shared narrative and consider how hard it is to remain successful when making three films in succession, you start to realize the brilliance of the MCU. In the 1970s, "Star Wars" gripped the pop culture world for doing something that no one had ever seen before.

Now, Marvel has changed the game with the same sort of surprising flair, and I have no doubt that we will talk about the MCU the same way we do "Star Wars" in 40 years.