MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

Author interview with Bob Iger, 2017. For years, the Marvel Studios production logo that ran at the beginning of its movies featured the riffling panels of comic-book pages (but with no identifiable heroes, said Peter Frankfurt, cofounder of Imaginary Forces, the firm that designed the logo, in a 2020 interview for this book: “They are the idea of Marvel Comics without any specificity to character”). Beginning with Doctor Strange in 2016, however, the logo was updated to include screenplay pages and starred a host of MCU actors, with glimpses of action scenes like Chris Evans throwing Captain America’s shield—an acknowledgement that more people were watching the movies than reading the comics that served as source material. The logo was originally silent, but in 2013 it got a fanfare by composer Brian Tyler. “Like all great studio logos, you need a fanfare, and we’d never had that before,” Kevin Feige said to Marvel.com. In 2016, Michael Giacchino wrote a new fanfare; Marvel Studios has regularly rotated the footage contained in its logo, so that new heroes, like Hailee Stanfield as Kate Bishop, can appear next to Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark.