Marvel Rivals players say that the game does one big thing better than any MCU movie lately

The praise for Marvel Rivals from across the gamersphere, and even beyond it, has been well-deserved up to this point.

The game is a massive success critically, financially, and in the court of public opinion, too. And one more reason to show the game some love was recently brought to the internet’s attention by a gamer who sparked a fun discussion about it.

“[Marvel Rivals is] turning C-listers into household names,” they said in a March 7 Reddit thread. “It’s actually making people fall in love with characters most people didn’t even know about, characters like Jeff the Landshark, Galacta, Squirrel Girl, and Luna Snow. People are actually eager to see them in live action now. Marvel Rivals is genuinely hard-carrying the Marvel brand right now.”

Whether the game is “hard-carrying” the entire brand is up for debate, but it’s a good point. The Marvel Cinematic Universe garnered a lot of praise for taking lesser known characters like those in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and turning them into pop culture stars.

It sounds odd to think about it now, but before the original GOTG movie came out in 2014, you would’ve been hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t a fan of comic books who knew who Rocket Raccoon, Groot, or Mantis were. Now, they’re core parts of Marvel Rivals and played central roles in the second-biggest box office success of all time, Avengers: Endgame.

Will characters like Jeff, Luna Snow, Galacta, and Squirrel Girl one day get the same treatment? It’s possible. Their popularity and notoriety is only growing more and more with the game’s success, so the odds of seeing them in live-action projects is absolutely possible now—and way higher than before.

“[Marvel Rivals has] got me buying old and new comics,” another commenter said. “[I don’t know] that the Marvel brand needed revitalized but this game has had a very positive impact on the brand.”

With Rivals‘ multiverse-centric storyline, NetEase Games can pull from any of the thousands of Marvel characters and add them to the game. And if the list of data mined and leaked heroes is any indication, there may be more new favorites.

After the vampire-slayer Blade is added in season two next month, the potential additions of lesser known characters include those like Hit-Monkey, Angela, Paste Pot Pete, Jia Jing, The Hood, Crystal, and others. And of course, there’s always going to be more big names that everyone knows, like several of the X-Men, Deadpool, Ultron, Captain Marvel, and others to come down the line.

Basically, Marvel really has something special on its hands with Marvel Rivals. If the game is popular enough to make a talking shark with legs a mainstream success, then it’s capable of just about anything if it continues to be supported with live-service content and quality of life updates for several years to come.