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Arad poked his head into the room, witnessing the moment when his rival’s dream was coming true. In his baritone voice, he dramatically intoned, “Be afraaaaaaid.”
John Turitzin remembered, “After describing Iron Man, he jumped from the eighth most popular character to being the first character. Kids thought it was really cool to have, basically, a robot that could fly and could shoot beams out of the palms of his hands. They thought that was great.” Hulk-branded merchandise already sold steadily—so based largely on toy potential, Marvel Studios planned to start with Iron Man and the Hulk.
“Ike Perlmutter neither discriminates nor cares about diversity,” said one person who worked with him. “He just cares about what he thinks will make money.”
“I think he’s a dick. I think he’s a bad person, and it was really surprising,” Penn said of Whedon.
a movie to be considered an official Chinese coproduction, one-third of the movie’s cast had to be Chinese or one-third of its running time had to take place in China. Audaciously, the Looper producers applied for that status anyway. The government didn’t grant it, but it did call Looper an “assisted production”—which was almost as good. It meant the movie had no blackout period and the producers were allowed to keep 100 percent of the box-office receipts. Looper was a hit, earning $176.5 million worldwide, albeit not on the scale of The Avengers, which
out the same year and earned $1.5 billion worldwide. In China, however, the favored status of the production meant that Looper yielded $20.2 million to The Avengers’ $12.9 million.
The notion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe held no allure for him: “I have no idea what it is. I don’t think they do either.”
It was a very modern protest campaign: It played out largely on social media and it centered on people who were trying to give their money to a corporation worth more than $150 billion.
“We were doing heroes that were white and in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties—that was the sweet spot. That’s what moved plastic. And that’s what our stories had to be.
Pascal could see for herself that the movie was overstuffed and disconnected. In an email to Doug Belgrad, president of Sony Pictures, two months before its release, she enumerated the problems: “Uneven, schizo tone . . . weird, disjointed, no one single great set piece because action is just big and not storytelling, not funny . . . if I’m really honest, wrong director and wrong casting.” She concluded, “We will almost get away with it and we can never go back.” “Almost get away with it” was an accurate prediction. Although the movie was projected to make $865 million and Sony hoped that it
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According to the license agreement, Spider-Man could not torture, smoke tobacco, or have sex before the age of sixteen; Peter Parker had to be heterosexual, Caucasian, and raised in Queens.)
‘Green Steve, can you come through this way and stand here? Just let out some crazy scream. We can see how that works.’ He would just give it his all, which was awesome. Green Steve was replaced on the second Avengers movie by some other guy, who we still called Green Steve, for some reason.”
