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Maisel went to the Marvel board of directors with his proposal to build a live-action studio. (In recent years, Arad has claimed that, earlier in 2003, he pitched the board a plan in which Marvel would form its own studio, only to get shot down because “Ike’s scared of the film business,”
would put up $525 million, with the legion of substitute heroes as collateral. Maisel reasoned this would be enough money to cover the budgets of four feature films (with some cash set aside for overhead). The brand-new studio had four chances to make at least one hit—or as Maisel put it, “We were guaranteed four at-bats.”
Popular storytelling rooted in clear delineation between good and evil seemed to have even greater appeal, evidenced by the success of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings (even if LOTR director Peter Jackson had to resist post-9/11 pressure to rename his 2002 installment, The Two Towers). It seemed like a moment custom-made for superheroes.
To make the romance work, Favreau needed to draw out the intelligence and charm of his leads, making sure they were playing heightened versions of themselves. In the comic books, Tony Stark doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, but Downey infused him with his own wit and wrapped the character in a blanket of sarcasm. Although Paltrow wasn’t as comfortable with improvisation as Downey, Favreau found a way to inject her personality into the script—he would jot down things Paltrow said during rehearsals and then repurpose them as Pepper’s dialogue.
FEIGE HAD AN IDEA FOR ONE LAST SCENE IN Iron Man. He was inspired by an unexpected source: the 1986 John Hughes comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, starring Matthew Broderick. As an obsessive teenage film fan, Feige had always stayed until the very end of the credits, reading all the names of the people who had made the movie he had just seen. But at the end of Ferris Bueller, he got a surprise: Broderick came back to tell viewers that
Jemas contemplated blowing up the entire existing Marvel comics universe and starting from scratch. (DC Comics, which felt similarly encumbered by its own history, had done just that in 1985, on the company’s fiftieth anniversary, with Crisis on Infinite Earths.) He was dissuaded and went with a less radical option: a separate “Ultimate” line of Marvel Comics that would take the characters back to basics, telling the tales of their earliest days—but updated for modern readers—and focusing on the most popular characters and storylines in Marvel history.
But Quesada recruited Brian Michael Bendis (a writer of independent crime comics who had also penned fill-in issues of Daredevil when its celebrity writer, director Kevin Smith, missed deadlines) to write Ultimate Spider-Man
They agreed that Marvel would regain the film rights to the Hulk character, but Universal Studios would distribute any films in the Hulk franchise. That meant that the Hulk could make a cameo or participate in a team-up without the involvement of Universal, so long as the Hulk’s name wasn’t in the title of the movie. This turned out to be a crucial point of negotiation on Maisel’s part: Universal had no idea of how much use Marvel could get out of the Hulk without the character headlining his own movies. The details of this contract would shape the MCU: this deal is the primary reason the Hulk
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Marvel had followed what happened on American History X more closely, it would have seen a preview of how things would spiral out of control on the set of The Incredible Hulk.
Norton had experience as both a director and a playwright; he claimed that when his then-girlfriend Salma Hayek starred in Frida (2002), he had done an uncredited top-to-bottom rewrite of the screenplay.
When the conversation turned to Norton and the question of how the actor had ended up in a superhero project, he said, to audible surprise, “Well, I wrote the film.” From Penn’s point of view, many of
When the film’s final credits were determined, there was, as expected, a WGA arbitration: the guild’s ruling was that Penn would be the sole credited screenwriter, giving him both pride of public ownership and future residual checks. Regardless, Norton thought of the script as his own and believed he had imbued it with the mythic underpinnings of the Prometheus tale.
Maisel had conspired with each of their wives to learn what car to buy: for Downey, it was a Bentley in a custom color, so it wouldn’t arrive for a few weeks. But for Favreau, it was a top-of-the-line Mercedes, and it was waiting for him at the valet stand. “They both drove those cars for a long time,” Maisel said.
(Ultimately, Marvel Studios decided that the post-credits scene happened in the same week as the action of Iron Man 2.)
Tony would have to wrestle with his family’s legacy and his own hubris.
Ike Perlmutter’s response to this recasting stands as one of the ugliest moments in Marvel’s history. He reportedly told Andy Mooney, then the chairman of Disney consumer products, that nobody would notice because all Black people “look the same.”
At the end of the film, when Fury tells Stark he isn’t Avengers material (leaving some room for the character to grow), video screens in the background play clips from Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk as breaking news footage—establishing Iron Man 2 as preceding that movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline, which was quickly becoming more complex than even Feige had expected.
One grace note that Rockwell added was Hammer’s sweet tooth; in virtually every scene, he is consuming, without explanation, a sugary treat like a lollipop or a cake.
Rourke also did what he could to control how his performance would be edited; he made a habit of gesturing idiosyncratically or eating food in the middle of elaborate shots he knew would be expensive to retake.
example, Tartakovsky came up with a spinning Iron Man laser that cut multiple drones in half; Favreau moved that effect to the end of the fight (and added a tag where Cheadle said, “Next time, lead with that.”)
The reviews were mixed, however, and audiences didn’t love it to the same degree they had the original.
LOL
Feige had a slightly more contemporary cultural touchstone in mind: The Godfather. “It’s about fathers and sons, and it’s about the actions that a father takes that his sons will have to answer for,” he said.
guy they didn’t know, sporting a scraggly beard and wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylor sneakers. But when he opened his mouth and spoke in a resonant, well-modulated British accent, the screenwriters realized it was Branagh. They got the job and started working with him, debating essential questions such as Thor’s role in the modern world and the name of Thor’s hammer. “One of my most vivid memories of those notes sessions,” Stentz said, “was Branagh didn’t like the name Mjölnir because it’s difficult to pronounce. He turned to all of us and asked, ‘Do we have to call the hammer
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movie Cabin in the Woods.
The
Marvel announced the casting decision in April 2010, but it took years for Evans to quell his worries. He later confessed to being roiled by fear and self-hatred while making his first Captain America movie. The mantra playing in his head: “This is it. I just signed my death warrant; my life’s over. I can’t believe I did this. This isn’t the career I wanted.” He relaxed once he realized that the Captain America movies were actually good. “The biggest thing I was worried about was making shitty fucking movies,” he said. “I don’t want to make shitty movies and be contractually obligated to make
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Writer Christopher Yost remembered one remarkable day of filming: “A few of the writers were on the lot, and a horse walked by in a full mo-cap getup, with tracking dots all over it.” He shook his head, still flabbergasted. “We never found out what it was doing.”
Searching for an unloved property to work on, Perlman picked Guardians of the Galaxy. She had never heard of the comic, but it seemed like the title in the slush pile closest to pure science fiction. She asked Marvel’s in-house librarian for every comic book the Guardians of the Galaxy had ever appeared in, expecting a handful of issues with guest appearances by this obscure interstellar team. Instead, the librarian showed up with a pushcart stacked high with Guardians comics dating back to 1969. “He brought out box after box after box,” she said. She could pick any incarnation of the team she
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WB network launched a TV series based on his screenplay for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it offered him the chance to be showrunner, basically as a courtesy—but he surprised them by accepting. Whedon turned the show into something extraordinary: a genre series about a teenage girl staking vampires in a small California town, it used monsters from the Hellmouth each week as metaphors for the agonies of adolescence. The hero’s journey of Buffy Summers across seven seasons (from 1997
He was hailed as a feminist hero and a geek icon, and a popular T-shirt was emblazoned with the words (in the Star Wars typeface) “JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW.” (Decades later, when it emerged that Whedon had run his show cruelly and capriciously, and had taken advantage of his position to sleep with various young women, fans regarded it not just as a disappointment, but a betrayal. Whedon was far from the worst #MeToo offender in Hollywood, but he had always presented himself as someone better than the average sleazy TV producer.)
Whedon insisted on writing the screenplay himself. “There was a script,” Whedon conceded. “There just wasn’t a script I was going to film a word of.” That initial Avengers screenplay was by Zak Penn, who was shunted aside again, just as he had been when Edward Norton signed on to The Incredible Hulk. “All the other directors we had been talking about, Joss wasn’t on the list,” Penn said. “I heard he was going to rewrite the script himself. He didn’t even want to meet with me—which, by the way, I always call the writer I’m replacing. I feel like that’s courtesy.” That snub was particularly
Penn said that he balked when Whedon told him to take his name off the screenplay that he had spent years developing: “My kids have grown up while I’ve been working on it. They’ve all told their friends about it. What’s going to happen when their friends are like, ‘Your dad didn’t work on Avengers’?” Whedon’s response, according to Penn: “What’s going to happen when my kids think that you wrote half the story?”
think he’s a dick. I think he’s a bad person, and it was really surprising,” Penn said of Whedon.
Chitauri from the Ultimate line of comics, because they had very little history and so allowed him maximum creative freedom.
Production was its toughest when filming the Battle of New York, shot in New Mexico, where vast indoor sets stood in for midtown Manhattan. Every action
Whedon had an idea for the movie’s post-credits scene, one that stemmed from his deep knowledge of Marvel comics. In a vignette, he revealed that Loki’s Chitauri army was on loan from Thanos, one of the most terrifying villains in the Marvel cosmos, a large purple alien with a corrugated chin and a serious infatuation with death. Whedon wasn’t trying to set up Thanos as the Avengers’ next foe. Rather, he just wanted to provide an explanation for where Loki’s army came from, seasoned with a bit of fan service. For its part, Marvel Studios was so focused on making sure that everything came
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All of Marvel’s movies since Winter Soldier have received a first draft created in collaboration with the Third Floor, a 3D pre-viz company founded in 2004 by a group of visual effects artists who had worked together on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Pre-viz became a tool to weed out ideas that don’t work. For example, in an early version of Fury’s car chase in Winter Soldier, Fury’s car was going to fly. As Rothwell recalled: “It was going to take off in the air, and it was going to become an airborne chase. Then Kevin said, ‘There are no flying cars in the Marvel Universe,’ and that was the
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The production company Endgame Entertainment had been working with director Rian Johnson on his sci-fi time-travel movie Looper; in 2011, Endgame brought on DMG as its partner. The movie had been slated to shoot most of its scenes in Louisiana, with a couple of weeks in Paris for idyllic flashbacks featuring the main character, Joe (actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and his wife. Now the Paris sequence was relocated to Shanghai and the Chinese actress Summer Qing was cast as Joe’s wife.
Ha
Favreau said in 2010. 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.”
a Starbucks near Abbey Road, Pearce quickly spotted Feige in his baseball cap, but when he greeted the studio president, he discovered that the document Feige had loaded onto his iPad was Pearce’s Iron Man manifesto. “And my first instinct is to panic,” Pearce said, “because I suddenly realized that I don’t remember a single word of it because I wrote it in total sleep deprivation, at a point of absolute madness.”
The meeting started just as Pearce had feared. “I didn’t know Drew was on the project when I took this thing, so I rebelled,” said Black. “I said, ‘Excuse me, there’s a British guy with a beard in this room, what’s he doing here?’ And they said, ‘Well, he’ll be writing the draft with you,’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s good, but no he won’t.’ ”
They discovered that they had similar senses of humor and bonded over their mutual love for The Seven-Ups, the 1973 action movie starring
Black said. “We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying ‘That cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because after consulting, we’ve decided that the toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female.’ ” He exhaled with frustration. “So we had to change the entire script because of toymaking. Now, that’s not Feige. That’s Marvel corporate.”
the American cut of the movie, Dr. Wu performs the operation and is never seen again, but the Chinese cut extended the sequence, added a scene where Dr. Wu drinks milk and calls J.A.R.V.I.S. (Stark’s AI) on the phone to pledge his support against the Mandarin, and included a commercial for the milk drink Gu Li Duo at the beginning of the movie. (The Chinese milk market was in turmoil at the time; a major dairy company had just recalled some of its baby formula because of mercury contamination, and so the industry needed to convince citizens to trust milk again.)
When it hit a rough patch, Marvel Studios was willing to do whatever it took to shore up its global box office receipts. To placate China and other conservative countries, Marvel had removed the fleeting references to homosexuality in its movies. That meant cutting a blink-and-you’ll-miss it relationship in Wakanda Forever and excising the queer-friendly signs and flags in the background of the San Francisco scenes of Quantumania.
Laaaaame. Lame.
(The “van surfing” scene in Teen Wolf was based on Loeb’s drunken antics as a Columbia student.)
Marvel Studios planned to reveal that S.H.I.E.L.D. was riddled with traitors a few movies down the line, and it wasn’t going to alter those plans to make life easier for Marvel Television. “They had said early on, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about doing this show about the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Kevin Feige recalled. “And Joss said, ‘I think I might do this.’ I said, ‘That’s cool. God bless you. But you should know that we’re destroying S.H.I.E.L.D. in Winter Soldier. You guys do whatever
Underscoring Marvel Studios’ lack of regard for Marvel Television: a movie centered on S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t mention, even in passing, that Agent Coulson, who hadn’t appeared in the MCU since The Avengers, was actually alive.)
Fantastic Four, the book that launched Marvel Comics, had been the company’s flagship title since 1962—but in 2014, it ceased publication rather than give free publicity to a Fox movie.
How determined was Marvel Studios to minimize any connection with Marvel Television? When it developed a movie starring another obscure superteam, the Eternals, the creators were instructed that none of it could take place in Hawaii. The studio didn’t want any risk that audiences might be reminded of the Inhumans.
For the eighth MCU movie, Markus and McFeely would draw on classics of paranoia, including The Parallax View, Marathon Man, and Three Days of the Condor. They nicknamed their script “Three Days of Captain America
