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the MCU, Captain America needed to take the fight to the grand conspiracy and win. McFeely and Markus spent most of the spring and summer of 2011 struggling with how to achieve that, until they had a crucial meeting with Feige, who told them, “I think we’re ready to take down S.H.I.E.L.D.”
The open secret of Marvel Studios was that Kevin Feige was a shadow director for all its movies.
Whenever the Falcon unfurls his wings in The Winter Soldier, the character is actually a digitally rendered double of Mackie.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier was one of the very best MCU movies, a taut action thriller where a man dressed in red, white, and blue has to confront a world colored in shades of gray. The movie grossed $714 million worldwide,
We’re all standing up now. Bunch of jackasses, standing in a circle.
(Those brothers all ended up in show business; one of them, Sean Gunn, had a recurring role on Gilmore Girls.)
He also costarred in the 2004 mockumentary Lollilove with his then-wife Jenna Fischer (not yet famous as Pam on The Office); the couple divorced in 2008 but remained friendly. “We weren’t the best at being married, but we’re the very best at being divorced,” Gunn said.
Charles Gunn, after the Gunn brothers.) “I wrote him an email and said, ‘Hey, I’m trying to get this job. Can you help me?’ ” Whedon emailed back: “You’re fucking late. I already talked to all of those guys about you.”
who touted The Specials as one of the best superhero movies ever made,
started the process by reading the Billboard charts for all of the top hits of the ’70s,” Gunn explained. “I downloaded a few hundred songs, and from that made an iTunes playlist of about 120 songs which fit the movie tonally. I would listen to the playlist on my speakers around the house—sometimes I would be inspired to create a scene around a song, and other times I had a scene that needed music and I would listen through the playlist, visualizing various songs.” Gunn filled his version of the screenplay with very specific needle drops.
Marvel Studios loved the movie’s mix tape, but the Creative Committee did not, and gave notes demanding the music’s removal. Feige
Marvel saturated the planet with Age of Ultron merchandise, the only Black Widow action figure on sale was part of a large Lego set. The only clothing item the Widow appeared on was a men’s T-shirt. She was, however, featured on a tote bag. Soon #WheresNatasha started trending on social media, often accompanied by photos of toy aisles filled with merchandise from Marvel’s billion-dollar Avengers franchise, always lacking the Black Widow. Four days before the release of Age of Ultron, Mark Ruffalo joined the cause, tweeting, “@Marvel we need more #BlackWidow merchandise for my daughters and
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The motorcycle drop, the centerpiece of the Age of Ultron trailers, inspired two different toy sets. Incredibly, one replaced the Widow with Captain America, while the other featured a motorcycle ridden by Iron Man—a character who can fly.
Avengers as a boys’ club was reinforced by answers actors Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans gave to a question during the Ultron press junket about Natasha’s affection for their characters, Hawkeye and Captain America. “She’s a slut,” Renner said. “She’s a whore,” Evans agreed. After the moment went viral, Evans quickly apologized, saying he had spoken “in a very juvenile and offensive way that rightfully angered some fans.” Renner, notably less contrite, told Conan O’Brien that he had no regrets about making the joke.
recognize that the Council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore
They were cheap. They were very cheap,” James Gunn remembered. When he first went to the Marvel Studios offices for a meeting about Guardians of the Galaxy, he couldn’t believe that he was in the headquarters of a studio making billion-dollar movies. “I was sitting in an office that seemed to be constructed of cardboard and scotch tape.”
noticed that many notes and interoffice memos were written in violet ink. “You like our purple pens?” Kevin Feige asked her. The first time Hildebrand opened the office’s supply closet, she understood: there was a vast stockpile of purple pens because the Marvel staffers had used all the black and blue pens in the multipacks, and the office wasn’t allowed to order more until all the purple ink had been used up.
As for his opinion of the Creative Committee: “They were a group of comic-book writers and toy people. Kevin and I were brain surgeons performing surgery, and we were surrounded by a group of podiatrists.”
While Whedon’s work didn’t suffer from the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy, he did sometimes lean on a killing machine/sexual fantasy dichotomy.
Whedon moved into a rented home in Burbank near the facility where Age of Ultron was being edited. The rough cut achieved the rare feat of uniting the East Coast and West Coast Marvel executives: They all agreed that the movie was a ponderous mess.
Hollywood, significant reshoots are often a symptom of a troubled production, but at this point in the Marvel filmmaking process, weeks of reshoots were routinely built into the production schedule.
“When shooting, you rarely see Kev,” Kyle said. “If he visits the set, he’s a lovely presence, but he spends very little time there. He’s usually just catching up on emails, preferably in another country so he can do it while people are sleeping, then he goes home. He says, ‘Look, just bring it all back and then we’re going to make a movie. Just give me all the pieces, I’ll make the puzzle.’ ” Shooting additional footage didn’t solve Whedon’s
The more a wrung-out Whedon talked with the press, the clearer it became that he had grown frustrated with Marvel Studios. “With so much at stake, there’s gonna be friction,” he said. “It’s the Marvel way to question everything. Sometimes that’s amazing. And sometimes”—Whedon growled through gritted teeth, his hostility clear—“that’s amazing.”
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.” ✶ THE MOOD AT Marvel Studios, once the staff learned of the regime change, was jubilant.
even if some of the visuals and story beats had become homogenized, even interchangeable between one movie and another. (Gwyneth Paltrow famously lost track of which of her scenes happened in which movies, forgetting that she appeared in Spider-Man: Homecoming.)
Wright had come up with his story before the sandbox existed, but now he found himself up to his neck in sand.
Clunky
Marvel Studios handed off the script to an in-house writer who did a pass that addressed all of the Creative Committee’s notes. In mid-May, around the time that filming was originally supposed to start, Marvel showed that revised draft to Wright—and he was horrified.
Spider-Man returned in Avengers: Infinity War (released the following year), and although he was a supporting character in a cast of dozens, the studio made sure he had plenty of on-brand moments: Peter Parker ditches a high school field trip to stow away on a spaceship; he is moved more than he wants to admit when Tony Stark officially makes him an Avenger by off-handedly knighting him during a dangerous trip halfway across the galaxy; he trades pop-culture wisecracks with Star-Lord; he gets in a fight with somebody vastly more powerful than him but holds his own; and he delivers one of the
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When Marvel asked Boseman to do the role with an American or British accent, he refused, because he believed that if he did, every line he uttered would imply that Wakanda, the utopian African nation where T’Challa is ruler, had been colonized at some point. “It felt to me like a deal-breaker,” he said. “I was like, ‘No, this is such an important factor that if we lose this right now, what else are we gonna throw away for the sake of making people feel comfortable?’ ”
The producers had the water tested for pH balance and pathogens, but everything seemed to be clean. They finally figured out the culprit: the high-intensity light reflecting off the water. “Our eyes got sunburned!” Bassett said. All the actors made a habit of donning sunglasses between takes.
“women’s liberation” movement—“This Female Fights Back!” promised the cover of her first issue—but Carol was mostly written by men, some of whom seemed baffled by feminism, or simply hostile to it. (In one storyline, when Ms. Marvel was an Avenger, she was impregnated and abducted by an alien while the rest of the team stood passively by.) At various points, Carol lost her memories and her powers, and even abandoned the Ms. Marvel name for years, going by Binary and Warbird.
she inspired a legion of fans who called themselves the Carol Corps. When
“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.”
During crunch time in Marvel postproduction—which seemed to be all the time, given that the studio now regularly released three movies a year—workdays could last twenty hours, a punishing schedule particularly hard for legions of anonymous CGI artists. Alonso did what she could to ameliorate the pain, ordering stacks of pizzas and walking around the offices with an oversized inflatable baseball bat covered with smiley faces that she dubbed the “Happy Stick.” She wielded it as she made her rounds, making sure that “everyone is still remembering that we’re supposed to be having fun, too.”
bellowing “HULK SMASH!” when he wreaked destruction, but in The Avengers, his trademark line was assigned to Captain America and cleverly inverted as a command: “Hulk, smash.” Wanda Maximoff appeared in five movies before anyone called her the Scarlet Witch.
“Avengers assemble!”—but when Chris Evans’s Captain America started to say that phrase, director Joss Whedon coyly cut him off midsentence as the credits rolled on Avengers: Age of Ultron. Nobody in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would say it onscreen until Avengers: Endgame, the twenty-second MCU film.
Downey and “not opinionated,” however, have rarely appeared together in the same sentence. The actor was uncertain about killing off the character he had become so closely identified with, but ultimately he accepted the narrative logic of the ending the Russos proposed.
not a master plan—the master document is the body of work, and Kevin. It’s a bunch of geniuses building a story up rather than building towards a story.” While Marvel Studios had constantly refined its process for producing visual effects in the name of reliability and consistency, it took a free-wheeling, almost ad hoc approach to the
four movies and is an amazing storyteller, said ‘Why don’t we just go full circle with it and say “I am Iron Man.” ’ ” A couple of weeks before Downey was scheduled to film additional
MCU screenings through their phones. (Marvel Studios assigned Benedict Cumberbatch to be Holland’s interview partner during press junkets, basically to babysit the young actor so he wouldn’t reveal any spoilers.) So the funeral was referred to in all production notes, memos, and scheduling documents as “The Wedding.”
Rocket Raccoon, as ever, was represented on set by Sean Gunn kneeling on the ground.
Actress Kerry Condon, who had voiced Tony Stark’s digital assistant, F.R.I.D.A.Y., ever since Paul Bettany’s J.A.R.V.I.S. was integrated into the Vision’s personality in Age of Ultron, found out about Downey’s departure the hard way. In the middle of a voice recording session for Endgame, she was fed a line that took her aback: “Life functions critical.” She asked for context: Even if Tony Stark was in critical condition, surely he could be saved, right?
They instructed her, “Say it like it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said.” As she read the line, Condon thought, “There goes my gravy train”—the sorrow in her delivery was very real.
Once all the Avengers were, ahem, in one place, Captain America finally uttered the six syllables that comic-book fans had been waiting for: “Avengers assemble.” (Chris Evans wisely underplayed the moment, as he had with “Hulk, smash,” knowing that the line was powerful enough without him bellowing it.) “I think that was Kevin’s highlight of all time. To be able to finally put those two words together and have him actually say it,”
Avengers: Endgame concluded with a flourish borrowed from one of Feige’s favorite film franchises: The final credit sequence features the six original Avengers, each of whom appear to be autographing the screen, signing off from the franchise. It mimicked the credits of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which similarly bid farewell to the beloved original cast of the Enterprise. But Feige’s love for the Star Trek franchise shaped the MCU in more fundamental ways.
took pains, Cargill realized, to include “the DNA of that campfire scene in every Marvel movie. He wants to take your favorite characters and give you the campfire scene, and give you that sequence in which you just love these people for who they are as people, regardless of their powers, so that when the big stuff happens, you really care about it.’ ”
Endgame had no bonus scenes—Phase Four would roll out without a teaser—but it ended with one last reminder of the beginning. In the final moments of the credits, the soundtrack was just a clanging noise: the sound of Tony Stark, trapped in a cave in Afghanistan, building the Iron Man armor. It also served as a representation of the immense labor that had gone into Endgame, and the MCU as a whole.
the interim, Gunn was even allowed to rewrite the dialogue for the Guardians in the scripts for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (and to nominate the song that heralded the group’s entrance in Infinity War, choosing the Spinners’ 1976 hit “The Rubberband Man”). By the end of 2017, Gunn had completed a draft of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and was expecting to film the movie in 2019 for a May 2020 release date. Just as Joss Whedon had been the czar of Phase Two
Rhythm & Hues had to swallow the costs of overages. “Twenty months of delays at $1.2 million to $1.6 million per month is anywhere from $24 million to $30 million of additional costs,” said Rhythm & Hues founder James Hughes. 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.
that, and Taika and I hit it off well. I actually got hired in the room. Feige was like, ‘This all sounds great, we’ll bring you on board.’ I called my agents, and I was like, ‘I think I just got hired to do Thor: Ragnarok.’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t know, Stephany, I’m not so sure about that.’ Then like an hour later business affairs called and they were like, ‘Oh my God, you were right! You did get hired in the room!’ ”
