MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

putting a toy designer in charge of Marvel Films made clear what Marvel wanted out of Hollywood: shows and movies that would help them sell more toys. In industry argot, they wanted to make entertainment that was “toyetic.”

In 1998, when Toy Biz swallowed up Marvel Comics, Perlmutter reorganized the business. The new parent company, called Marvel Enterprises, had four subsidiary groups: Marvel Studios, Toy Biz, Licensing (for products that weren’t toys or movies), and Publishing (aka Marvel Comics).

Every semester, Feige applied to the film school—and five times in a row, he was rejected. “My friends and my family started to politely suggest that maybe I look for another major,” he said. “They said USC was actually a very large university with a number of wonderful areas of academic study outside of film. I told them I had no idea what they were talking about.” The sixth time Feige applied to the USC film program, he got in.

So it was no surprise that Jackson soon spotted his own face in the pages of The Ultimates. Flattered but confused, he called his agents: Had he given permission for this to happen? According to Hitch, “Sam’s people got in touch with Marvel and said, ‘Should we be suing you over this?’ ” Marvel avoided a lawsuit by saying that if Nick Fury was ever in a movie, Jackson could play the role. The actor accepted the offer.

A movie that seemed like a guaranteed smash almost fell apart, threatening not just the box office receipts of one summer movie, but the fate of a studio attempting to establish itself. The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton and released in the summer of 2008, remains one of Marvel’s least-loved projects. It’s the movie that newcomers to the MCU are encouraged to skip. But it also taught Marvel Studios a valuable early lesson about the limits of collaboration. Put another way, Marvel learned that top-down authority and creativity are not necessarily in conflict with each other. Marvel eventually boiled that moral down to its essence. “We have a no-asshole policy on our movies,” one Marvel performer summarized.

According to producer Craig Kyle, the two primary mantras shared by Marvel staffers were more worldly: “Pain is temporary, film is forever” and “If you’re not going to bother to come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” Kyle noted, “These movies are really, really, really hard.”

Favreau was done: he had no interest in figuring out how to make The Avengers work, no interest in fending off Marvel’s increasingly frequent meddling, no interest in running himself into the ground any further than he already had for Ike Perlmutter’s bottom line. He remained part of the Marvel ensemble as an actor, making half a dozen appearances as “Happy” Hogan, and even getting an on-screen romance with Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May. And as a director, he took charge of other CGI extravaganzas, including The Jungle Book and The Mandalorian. But he never directed another MCU movie after Iron Man 2.

Superpowers, not being real, could work any way the creators of comic books and comic-book movies want: it’s an extremely literal choice to say that with great power comes great muscularity. But Marvel leaned into that genre convention, so much so that the actors who didn’t have rippling physiques felt the need to bulk up.

seven years after the creation of Marvel Television, there hadn’t been much in the way of visible corporate synergy beyond a couple of Samuel L. Jackson cameos on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Mackie said bluntly that fans shouldn’t expect those crossovers anytime soon. “Different universes, different worlds, different companies, different designs. Kevin Feige is very specific about how he wants the Marvel Universe to be seen in the film world. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work at all.”

The comics and cartoon character He-Man, invented by the toy company Mattel, rides an oversized tiger called Battle Cat only because Mattel had a surplus of unsold giant tiger toys that could be packaged and sold with the muscle-bound warrior.

Iger waited until 2023, when he and Perlmutter were battling over the composition of the Disney board of directors, to tell the unvarnished story: To assert his control over Marvel Studios, Perlmutter had tried to fire Feige. “I thought that was a mistake and stepped in to prevent that from happening,” Iger said. “He was not happy about it.”

Feige and Pascal expected that the Sony/Marvel Spider-Man deal would cover a trilogy of films, although only two were contractually mandated. But after the success of Venom and Into the Spider-Verse, Sony felt confident about its own Spider-Sense. (Or its “Peter Tingle.”) Midway through the Far from Home shoot, Sony told Marvel that it would be reclaiming the Spider-Man solo franchise, reasoning that it didn’t need Kevin Feige as producer to make a hit Spider-Man movie starring Tom Holland. Marvel kept that bombshell secret from the cast and crew, but after the (insanely profitable) release of Spider-Man: Far from Home, the news leaked. Sony would not be renewing the Marvel deal.

Then DeConnick realized she knew how to explain it. “The difference is, Steve gets back up because it’s the right thing to do. Carol gets back up—well, the thing I say has a curse word in it, which Disney loves—but Carol gets back up because fuck you. Carol gets up not because it’s righteous or just, but because she’s full of piss and vinegar.”

Most VFX companies flirted with financial insolvency; the industry grew accustomed to a certain level of churn. Rhythm & Hues, for example, had been a key contributor of CGI to Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk in 2008, but it was driven into bankruptcy by a pair of 2012 films: Snow White and the Huntsman and a movie for which it won an Academy Award, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi.

At the Oscars ceremony in early 2013, the visual team accepting the award declared that Rhythm & Hues was going bankrupt because of its work on that movie—and then was played offstage by the Jaws theme. The company shuttered completely in 2020.

Judging that Fox Entertainment wouldn’t survive the transition to streaming, Rupert Murdoch sold his studio (and assets such as its film library) in 2018. After a bidding war with the cable company Comcast, Disney acquired 20th Century Fox for $71 billion—a crucial acquisition that bolstered its content just before it launched Disney Plus. The Fox acquisition came with some significant assets, notably the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, which had been held by Fox for many years. The teams would finally return to Marvel Studios, giving Feige the opportunity to reboot both properties.

Sommers and McKenna had not only skillfully juggled a huge cast of characters but had come up with an ending that would set up Spider-Man’s future either with Marvel Studios or with Sony Pictures. Believing that he has only had one way to save the multiverse, Peter Parker asks Doctor Strange to erase the knowledge that he is Spider-Man from everyone’s memory. He ends the film alone and penniless in Manhattan, with his friends and fellow Avengers having no clue as to his identity. If Marvel stopped producing Spider-Man films starring Tom Holland, Sony Pictures could pick up this new life for Peter Parker without causing any continuity issues with the MCU.

Starting in the late 2000s, however, Marvel’s publishing contracts included bonuses for original characters that appear in movies or TV through a “Special Characters Contract,” although they’re riddled with complicated loopholes. If a character appears for less than 15 percent of screen time, for example, that’s considered “just” a cameo, meaning a creator is owed significantly less. By those metrics, for example, cameos include Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier in Captain America: Civil War. Despite being the linchpin of the plot, he appears in twenty-two minutes (just under 15 percent) of its two-hour, twenty-eight-minute running time. Ditto Chris Evans as Captain America, who appeared for less than eight minutes in Avengers: Infinity War.

Though WandaVision was not originally meant to premiere first, it launched Marvel on Disney Plus in early 2021, and was perhaps the best debut Marvel could have hoped for. The show, overflowing with TV history and effervescent banter between Bettany and Olsen, was a bona fide phenomenon that reached an audience well beyond devoted MCU fans. The critically acclaimed show received twenty-three Emmy nominations, winning three, for costumes, production, design, and composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (for their iTunes chart-topper “Agatha All Along”).

Soon after Iger retired, however, he watched his achievements crumble. The brands he had built and polished so lovingly felt mundane once you could simply stream, say, the latest Pixar offering at home. In 2022, Disney’s stock price plummeted by 40 percent. The blame couldn’t be laid entirely at Chapek’s feet. The pandemic affected every sector of the global economy, and Disney Plus, which was hemorrhaging money, was a project he had inherited from Iger. But Chapek never had the ability to weave a convincing story for anxious shareholders; that was Iger’s gift. And so, in November 2022, the Disney board of directors showed Chapek the door, despite having just renewed his contract. Iger promised to return for at least two years to help right the ship. Disney stock rebounded by 10 percent on the day after Iger announced his return. Disney creatives, too, were overjoyed to have their greatest ally back. Less sanguine was Ike Perlmutter, who battled with Iger for control of the Disney board—after Perlmutter lost, Iger eliminated his fiefdom of Marvel Entertainment and removed Perlmutter from Disney’s org chart on March 29, 2023.