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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest movie franchise of all time. There had been great superhero movies before the Marvel Studios started making them, and there have been great superhero movies since Marvel Studios started making them - but what Kevin Feige and Co. have figured out is how to consistently make good (and sometimes great) movies, and they've done it by relying on an implicit formula that once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Before I get there, it's important to note that MCU movies aren't superhero movies. Yes, they have superheroes in them, but they work best when it's not superheroes doing superhero-y things. Instead, they're doing something else, while having superheroes in them.

In this week's Marvel Matters, I make the MCU's implicit formula, explicit. The secret recipe of the MCU lies in not making it a superhero movie, but in taking popular genres (or in some cases subgenres), and doing versions of those kinds of movies using superheroes and supervillains. Years before the term 'superhero fatigue' became known, Marvel Studios saw the weakness in making 'just' superhero movies and instead aimed for a diversity of genres interlinked by a recurring cast of characters who happened to be superheroes.

This isn't a new idea, not even at Marvel if you recall the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk TV series. But with the MCU and the goal to make two to four MCU movies a year, they knew they had to avoid the constraints of being just a 'superhero' movie.

2008's Iron Man wasn't a superhero movie - it was a tech-savvy action movie full of personality a la Tom Cruise's Top Gun (remember, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play Tony Stark). That same year, The Incredible Hulk was a monster movie a la Frankenstein or The Shape of Water (if you recall, Guillermo Del Toro was in talks to do a Hulk project for Marvel as well). The Thor movies are a Shakespearean family drama - about godlike beings having the same human foibles we all do. Then the Captain America movies have been different versions of war movies, from the super-patriotic first movie being like John Wayne's The Fighting Seabees to the second being a political conspiracy movie a la Three Days of the Condor.

When it came time to do the first crossover movie in the Avengers, Joss Whedon said he was heavily inspired by The Dirty Dozen; again, a war movie, but also in uniting a group of disparate individuals who at best don't know each other, and at worst don't get along, to find some commonality and camaraderie to vanquish the bigger foe.

For its Phase 2 launches, Marvel adapted the space epic subgenre with Guardians of the Galaxy, then the science-fiction subgenre around shrinking and growing with Ant-Man. Phase 3's Doctor Strange is a "magical fantasy" movie as co-writer C. Robert Cargill calls it, and Jon Watts' Spider-Man movies were all built in the vein of John Hughes' teenage comedy/dramas of the '80s. For the seminal Black Panther film, they rooted it in jet-setting international espionage movies like the James Bond series.

As the MCU has grown into over 20 movies and expanded onto TV, the balance between it being a 'genre project with superheroes' and it being a straight-up superhero movie has sometimes skewed (as has the success of the MCU projects, to be honest), the MCU DNA still remains this - just look at the road trip movie/buddy cop movie ala 48 Hours that is Deadpool & Wolverine.

Remember, they're not superhero movies. They are movies with superheroes.

Consider this a meta post-credits scene for Marvel fans - the four key articles you need to read next to continue the thrills:

• How to watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe in release or chronological order
• The best Marvel Comics stories of all time
• All the MCU movies ranked from best to worst
• Our weekly Marvel insider's column, Marvel Matters