More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Public sentiment had once again changed the tenor of a Disney/Sony negotiation over Spider-Man. A few years earlier, fans yearning to see Spider-Man in the MCU had induced Sony to close a deal; now the pressure was on Disney, which reconsidered its hard line on a fifty-fifty split.
led us down different story roads,” McKenna said. They played with an updated version of It’s a Wonderful Life, where Peter Parker and Doctor Strange try to undo the fact of the world knowing his identity. That narrative echoed a 2007 comic-book story called One More Day, which was controversial among comics fans because it erased the twenty-year marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson from history and even from their own memories.
No Way Home, filming under the code name Serenity Now (a Seinfeld reference).
Sony Pictures could pick up this new life for Peter Parker without causing any continuity issues with the MCU.
think I brought a structure to it.” Wanda and the Vision live in laugh-track bliss with their two young children—until the cracks start to show and reality (which includes the Vision being dead) intrudes. “In the writers’ room, we had intense conversations about grief and loss,” Schaeffer said. Those discussions led to the show’s best-known line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”
bitterly fought any creators looking for additional compensation. 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
...more
hewed closer to specific issues and graphic novels, which made it harder to wave away the original comic-book creators. While Marvel had long observed a church-and-state separation between the comic-book publisher on the East Coast and Marvel Studios on the West Coast, those boundaries seemed blurrier now that Feige oversaw both divisions. A later Disney series, Hawkeye, drew so heavily from writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja’s award-winning 2012–2015 run on the comic that Fraction, at least, landed a consulting producer credit and a more significant payday.
Asked if he minded how often Feige dipped into the Rick and Morty talent pool, Harmon said: “Well, you can’t fight Kevin Feige in the street. He’ll just say, ‘Oh, I love that you’re fighting me. This is so wonderful,’ and everyone will start booing you for being a bully. It
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier didn’t draw the same reaction, from fans or critics, in part because it seemed caught halfway between TV and movie formats, as evidenced by the large cinematic climaxes unevenly paced throughout its run of episodes. The show also shouldered the burden of detailing the aftermath of the Snap and wound up bogged down in a sociopolitical thought experiment of what the world might look like if half its population were erased. Future MCU installments would largely opt to sidestep this narrative sinkhole.
As a result, most Marvel shows were sturdier at the beginning than at the end. Writers were hamstrung in their efforts to build up to a satisfying conclusion because they had to leave room to maneuver at the end of every storyline, knowing that the studio might abruptly change its future plans for a given character. “The finale was just this ongoing question,” WandaVision’s Schaeffer said. “Which is pretty typical for Marvel projects—the climax of a Marvel movie is just iterated and iterated until the very end.”
WandaVision, Feige had teased that the events of the show would lead “directly” into the Doctor Strange sequel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That plan fell apart when director Scott Derrickson abruptly departed the MCU to direct The Black Phone, cowritten with his Doctor Strange screenwriter, C. Robert Cargill, saying that he was leaving to protect his own mental health. “He wanted to do one movie, and Marvel wanted to do another movie,” Cargill said. “So he sat there and said, ‘Well, shit, I’ve got this great script [The Black Phone] that I wrote with Cargill.’ ”
She later wrote that after she aired her fangirl grievances, Feige caught her eye. “He just stared at me from a far [sic] and gestured 6-1-6 with his fingers and walked away. I think about that every night before bed.”
just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to let my friend down.” Unfortunately, after Wanda was portrayed with nuance by Elizabeth Olsen across hours of serial television, many fans were disappointed by her appearance as the Multiverse of Madness villain. She seemed to repeat her grief-stricken arc from WandaVision, only faster and louder. The multiverse
Some companies have seminars on how to file expense reports; Marvel Studios had meetings that Feige described as “the whole broad Marvel Studios team going through the multiverse and the rules of the multiverse.”
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.
He could make a movie about almost any of them work—“Maybe not Woodgod,” Feige conceded, laughing about the most obscure character on the poster, almost impossible to pick out of the crowd. He thought for a moment, and smiled slyly. “Although now I’m going to go look him up again.”
Admittedly, by the end of the Alias pilot, Jennifer Garner’s character Sydney Bristow has learned that the branch of the CIA she is working for, SD-6, is actually a terrorist organization hostile to the United States, but Abrams’s shows were never famous for their internal consistency.
SMASH CUT TO —
Sick
To make the Hulk look real, rather than a cartoon plopped into a scene like MC Skat Kat, required a lot of tinkering and experimentation. Chu’s secret weapon: a guy called “Green Steve.” “He was a Chippendales dancer and we painted him green,” Chu explained. “At the end of every take, we would call out Green Steve, and he would come out and start flexing and turning around. We could see how his skin reacted to light.”
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
...more
Copyright © 2024 by On Your Left, LLC
