Marvel vs. DC: Which way is user sentiment swaying?
Marvel vs. DC has been an age-old debate. In the past year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, both comic-book giants had to put a halt on their large movie projects.
However, in 2021, they have both made a reappearance — Marvel with two popular new Disney+ series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TFATWS), and DCEU with an extended cut of Justice League by director Zack Snyder, gaining traction on twitter with #SynderCut and #SnyderVerse. DCEU also released a trailer of the long-awaited sequel to Suicide Squad.
In order to understand the sentiment of Twitter users towards Marvel and DCEU, this article will do a comparative analysis of the keywords associated with both terms and their usage online.
2000 tweets were selected from #Marvel and #DCEU respectively. [DCEU, or the DC Extended Universe was chosen over DC to avoid confusion with tweets referencing Washington DC]
These tweets were first analysed to see the positive and negative keywords used alongside both respective Hashtags.
Both pie charts show that majority of the tweets with #Marvel and #DCEU had mostly positive keywords. However, #DCEU had a slightly larger number of negative keywords, 35.4% compared to #Marvel’s 27.3%.
Next, a larger array of hashtags were selected, both representing projects and titles affiliated to Marvel and DC.
[Note: Red represents projects affiliated with Marvel and Grey is for DC projects]
First, the tweets were analysed to see the percentage of total sentiment terms found used within them. The graph shows that #Marvel had the highest number of sentiment terms. Interestingly, the projects #SnyderCut and #Snyderverse had more sentiment terms than #DC and #DCEU. This can be attributed to the strong reactions people had for director Zack Snyder releasing the extended cut of Justice League as opposed to the production house DCEU.
The percentage of negative and positive sentiment terms were then analysed. They show a similar pattern to the above-graph. #Marvel has the highest negative and positive sentiment terms — this can be attributed to the high number of overall sentiment terms used in tweets with #Marvel compared to the other hashtags.
The sentiment score is a helpful indicator to analyse the overall sentiment. According to the graph below, the most negative sentiment score belongs to #SnyderCut, followed by #JusticeLeague and #Snyderverse. In general, the hashtags related to DC projects have a lower sentiment score than that of the Marvel hashtags.
Finally, word clouds were done to see what some of the most tweeted words were alongside the words ‘Marvel’ and ‘DCEU’.
