MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

Just thirty-eight years old, Feige didn’t carry himself like the head of a Hollywood studio, or like a veteran of bloody internal corporate battles who already ranked as one of the most successful movie producers of his generation. He seemed more like a film fan who had won a “Have Dinner with the Avengers” radio contest. But when he explained his ambitions for Marvel, which would span multiple series of interconnected movies, everybody fell silent.

By April 2023, when we finished writing this book, Marvel had made thirty-one feature films with a worldwide gross of over $28 billion. Considered as a whole, that output was easily the most successful film series of all time. (In second place was the Star Wars series, with twelve movies grossing a total of $10.3 billion.)

The Marvel method could have ended up as an assembly line, but as with the old studio system, it has resulted in a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces. From the start, the Marvel Studios ethos was “best idea wins,” and all of its productions were open to suggestions from anyone working on a movie, or even people who were just standing in the vicinity, like a studio janitor or a kid visiting the set. The studio made it possible for off-kilter geniuses to construct movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, which melded big-budget superhero adventures with personal visions.

Not everyone has been a fan, of course. Martin Scorsese famously said in 2019 that superhero movies were “not cinema,” adding, “Honestly, the closest I can think of them—as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances—is theme parks.” Francis Ford Coppola agreed, calling superhero movies “despicable.” He spelled out his contempt: “There used to be studio films. Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different.”

The studio has sailed at full speed into a sea of dilemmas familiar to the writers and illustrators of Marvel comics: how to extend a story with no obvious endpoints, how to keep familiar characters relevant, how to constantly reinvent the formula for success without rebooting the whole enterprise.

At the behest of Disney, Marvel Studios kept accelerating the pace of production, pushing the boundaries to determine how much of a good thing would be too much. Phase One of the MCU movies took roughly five years to roll out, only a slightly shorter span than the schedule for Phases Four, Five, and Six combined. Making three movies and roughly six TV series a year was a pace that fatigued both the audience and the filmmakers themselves. The success of the MCU relied on the hands-on input of some key executives, especially Feige, and it turned out that there were limits to how much that model could be scaled up into mass production. Fans complained that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was lackluster and overwhelmed by mediocre computer graphics—but that didn’t stop it from spending weeks as the top movie in the United States in early 2023, when it grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lee tried to encourage Hollywood interest in adapting the company’s characters for movies and TV shows. For the most part, he failed abjectly. In his Stan’s Soapbox column, printed in the back of Marvel comic books, Lee would periodically hyperventilate about an upcoming movie or TV show, which would almost inevitably not materialize.

Tired of waiting for the lawsuits to resolve, Cameron (and DiCaprio) moved on to Titanic, which came out in 1997. The director would later call Spider-Man “the greatest movie I never made.”

By 1998, the litigation had wound down and most of the Spider-Man movie rights had reverted to Marvel. The exception was Columbia (and its parent company, Sony), which maintained a claim on the home-video rights, which in turn made it hard for Marvel to cut a deal with any other studio. Sony made Marvel an offer for the Spider-Man movie rights: $10 million, plus 5 percent of the gross and half of the toy revenue. Marvel countered by offering the movie rights to every character it still had available. That lineup didn’t include the Fantastic Four or the X-Men, but it did cover Captain America, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange, in addition to Spider-Man. For just $25 million, Sony could have the rights to most of the future stars of the MCU.

Luckily for Marvel, Sony turned down the offer, with Sony Pictures executive Yair Landau declaring, “Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters.”

Among the feedback on Shuler Donner’s desk, as the pile of X-Men scripts grew, were notes on the scripts from her assistant, who had started four years earlier as an intern. “Because Lauren is an amazing mentor and is so gracious, she would read the notes,” said that assistant, Kevin Feige. “Eventually she started saying, ‘Hey, come into the office and sit with me.’ I would be sitting with Tom DeSanto, who’s the producer of X-Men, and Bryan Singer, who was the newly hired director, and I just started to become a part of that creative team.”

Every semester, Feige applied to the film school—and five times in a row, he was rejected. “My friends and my family started to politely suggest that maybe I look for another major,” he said. “They said USC was actually a very large university with a number of wonderful areas of academic study outside of film. I told them I had no idea what they were talking about.” The sixth time Feige applied to the USC film program, he got in.

He was also smart enough not to meddle: he watched, learned, and intervened only at key moments. He advocated for the casting of Australian musical-theater actor Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (aka Logan), even though he was considered too tall to play a character traditionally rendered as compact. The cast also included Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart—but not Michael Jackson, who had lobbied the production team for the role of Professor Charles Xavier. When Shuler Donner reminded the pop star that Professor X was an old white guy, Jackson replied, “I can wear makeup

Feige said he learned two important things from working with Sam Raimi. “And when I say ‘working with,’ ” he clarified, “I say that more as ‘hanging out and watching.’ ” One was to exert maximum effort on a movie, so that at the end, you would feel “like a deflated balloon,” knowing that you had put everything you had into it. The other was to make decisions based on how you wanted the audience to feel, rather than trying to overwhelm them with your artistic vision. “If it’s not going to translate, it’s literally meaningless,” Feige said. “Sam always put everything he had into those movies, from a passionate fan’s point of view and from the audience’s point of view.”

Arad and Kevin Feige were well aware of the limitations of the layering approach. They tried to exert their influence over Marvel movies, but not having the final say rankled them, even on projects where they respected their collaborators. “We suggested but they didn’t listen,” Feige said years later, diplomatically declining to call out any of the superhero flops of that era by name or to criticize any of the specific studio executives for their misunderstanding of Marvel’s characters. “We didn’t have the control. I hated that.”

Arad’s method of making Marvel movies had fallen out of favor with Perlmutter, who was unhappy with the financial yields from his licensing deals. But since the two Israeli buddies had been through a war together to win control of Marvel in the 1990s, Perlmutter was generous. In May 2006, Arad’s 3.15 million shares of Marvel stock became fully vested, allowing him to sell a chunk of them for $60 million. Having made it in Hollywood, Arad had no interest in returning to toy design. Instead, he planned to create his own production company, Avi Arad Entertainment. He signed a non-compete deal, which meant that he could be an advisor on Marvel characters appearing in movies made by other studios (such as his beloved Ghost Rider), but he could not make any superhero or fantasy movies unless they were based on Marvel properties. Because he was still on staff when the deals were made for Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, he received a producer title on each movie; he would also continue to produce Spider-Man movies for Sony, including future spinoffs such as Venom and Morbius. (Avi’s son Ari left Marvel Studios with him.)

the earliest stages of preproduction, he walked into his shabby new Marvel Studios office and wrote one word on a whiteboard: PLAUSIBILITY. He was making a movie about a man who could fly, but he wanted to keep the story as earthbound as possible. Hundreds of ideas about the film came and went on that whiteboard, but that one word, plausibility, always stayed. (Favreau was echoing the sign over the door to Richard Donner’s office—VERISIMILITUDE—but at least chose a synonym that was easier for Feige to pronounce.)

Despite decades of work in Hollywood and a 1992 Oscar nomination (for Chaplin), Downey, then forty-one, had an almost perfect record of commercial failure and a well-publicized reputation as a substance abuser. Most famously, under the influence in 1996, he broke into the house of a neighboring family in Malibu and passed out in an empty bed belonging to an eleven-year-old child. In 2001, after another drug arrest, he was fired from the TV show Ally McBeal. But he had cleaned up, married the whip-smart producer Susan Levin, and gradually worked his way back into Hollywood’s good graces. Despite his troubles, many people in the movie business liked him and wanted to keep working with him.

Nevertheless, the answer from New York, according to Favreau, was “Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.” Uncowed, Favreau anonymously leaked the news that Downey was in talks to star as Tony Stark. When movie fans on the internet reacted to that planted story with overwhelming enthusiasm, the New York executives finally acquiesced.

Downey Jr., not yet a global superstar, was fond of visiting the modest Marvel offices to see how the production was progressing. “There was no script, and we were basically writing the movie on the wall,” says Stephen Platt. (The screenwriters had generated reams of pages, but nothing had been nailed down.) “There’s no action beats, there’s nothing. It’s literally like ‘Iron Man fights an army.’ ” As the art team showed off their work, Platt said, Downey eagerly posed in fight stances, playing out potential scenarios in front of the sketches taped to the wall. “He was just like a little kid at Christmas,” Platt recalled. “He couldn’t wait to get going.”

THEY HAD NO SCRIPT, MAN,” JEFF BRIDGES GROUSED. “We would show up every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to call up writers on the phone: ‘You got any ideas?’ I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines. I made a little adjustment in my head. That adjustment was: Jeff, just relax, you are in a 200 million dollar student film, have fun, just relax.”

Before Iron Man started shooting, Jon Favreau and his collaborators moved out of the overcrowded Marvel Studios office above the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills, leaving the Marvel Studios executives behind and relocating the movie’s production to the old Howard Hughes studios in dusty Playa Vista, California. (As a bonus, that was one step further away from supervision by Marvel’s East Coast executives.) “I don’t even know how to describe it—it was, like, all dirt,” hair designer Nina Paskowitz recalled. “There were a couple of little sheds on the property, a couple of little housing things, and that’s it.” By the time various departments—makeup, editing, design—moved to Playa Vista, they were working off outline plot points and concept art. There was still no locked script. The creative staff had plenty of work, but their isolation also fostered a party atmosphere. Art director Dave Klassen and production designer Michael Riva, who had also collaborated with Jon Favreau on his 2005 film Zathura: A Space Adventure, hosted cocktail hours that soon became legendary. “Martinis, beer, whatever,” Stephen Platt reminisced. “It was great because it’s a morale thing, right?”

“We continued to rewrite it all through the next five months, on set, nonstop. And it was a blast,” Marcum recalled. “A blast” wasn’t how everyone viewed it—while Downey thrived and Paltrow soon adapted, Bridges remained uncomfortable. “Jeff loved to have a script a good three months before he did the scene,” Favreau recalled. That wasn’t remotely possible on Iron Man. “Robert would come in and bounce the script off the wall of the trailer every day.”

Favreau knew the scene needed emotional weight, so he decided to rewrite it himself. “He wanted that to be a bonding moment for them,” Fergus explained. “He wanted to really revel in it. It’s kind of intimate and kind of gross and kind of sexy. He really wanted that moment to land, and he spent a lot of time on that scene.” Favreau was highlighting that Tony Stark, the man with a hundred girlfriends, trusted only Pepper Potts with his heart.

KEVIN 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 the movie was over and that they should go home. “It was the greatest thing in the world,” Feige said. “I thought it was hilarious. It was like a little reward for me for sitting through the credits.” (Movies with notable post-credits scenes before Ferris Bueller’s Day Off include Night of the Living Dead, The Muppet Movie, Meatballs, and Airplane!)

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 has not starred in any further standalone movies, despite his prominence and popularity.

If 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. When Norton clashed with director Tony Kaye over the shape of their violent and disturbing film about the rise of neo-Nazi culture in America, New Line Cinema sided with its leading man. Norton was allowed to reedit the movie, adding about twenty minutes to what had once been a taut ninety-five-minute cut. Kaye complained that Norton had “generously given himself more screen time.” Furious at having lost control of his film, Kaye tried to get his name removed from it and have it pulled from film festivals, efforts that didn’t achieve much except for undermining his own directorial career. American History X was hailed as a triumph and Norton received that Oscar nomination for best actor.

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. So before he agreed to star in The Incredible Hulk, he extracted a promise from Marvel that he would be able to revise Zak Penn’s screenplay. Norton believed the Hulk could carry some serious dramatic weight and had ambitions for the character to be more than brand-name intellectual property in another popcorn movie. Marvel considered Norton’s desire to get involved creatively to be a boon, not a burden, hoping his presence would give The Incredible Hulk the same sheen of prestige that Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow were providing on Iron Man.

From Penn’s point of view, many of the changes Norton made to his script were cosmetic, possibly because much of the film had already been storyboarded and pre-visualized, possibly because Norton was trying to position himself for an eventual credit arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. “I had him walking east down the street wearing a blue hat and now he’s walking west down the street wearing a red hat,” Penn said. “And I had named his downstairs neighbor Lorina, and he changed it to Malina or something.”

Although Norton had made his desire to play both Banner and the Hulk one of his key negotiating points before he signed on, when the digital team began to collect the data that would make the Hulk move, he wasn’t actually interested in strapping on the bodysuit and wrestling with Terry Notary and his motion-capture buddies. Using MOVA on top of motion capture was a compromise intended to allow Norton to contribute to the Hulk’s scenes, although Norton’s MOVA facial data didn’t translate well to a Hulk CGI model that didn’t much resemble him. In any event, the workarounds were set aside when it became clear that Norton wasn’t going to put in the hours necessary for a CGI performance.

Notary was blunter: “[Norton] wasn’t really engaged, as far as the Hulk stuff goes, unless he was transforming from himself into the Hulk. He was not very present through the whole thing.” Roth, in contrast, relished working with Notary again, and periodically would get in the motion capture bodysuit himself. “Try this, mate!” he’d tell Notary, who described him as “one of those quintessential actors that likes to be involved, wants to make sure that he’s going to look good and his character’s going to look good.”

Marvel Studios wasn’t yet two years old, but it already understood the importance of a climactic battle—on-screen and off. As they pushed for changes, studio executives faced a final confrontation with Edward Norton, the Hulk of their own making. Attempting to salvage the situation, Maisel, Feige, Leterrier, and Norton met. Norton was adamant that he had signed onto the movie because he was promised a large degree of control, and he was irate that Marvel was now trying to cut his emotional epic into a trivial summer blockbuster. Norton frequently cited the Prometheus myth to explain his intentions with the Hulk. He thought of the movie as a portrait of a man out of control, establishing a complex character that could be developed further in the sequels that he said he wanted to make. Marvel Studios, for its part, felt that it had indulged Norton throughout development and production, often accepting his suggestions under its unofficial credo of “best idea wins.” But now, Marvel believed, Norton had used his position in the editing room to push for an excessive amount of Banner footage; what he called character development, the Marvel executives considered to be self-indulgent chaff.

Norton’s edit of the movie, for example, began with Bruce Banner in the Arctic, attempting suicide—unsuccessfully, because he transforms into the Hulk before he can die. The Hulk then causes an earthquake that briefly reveals an Easter egg: a frozen Captain America underneath the tundra. Marvel believed the attempted suicide was far too bleak an opening for what was fundamentally an adventure movie. When several rounds of notes failed to solve the underlying problems, the studio wanted to reassert control. On Iron Man, giving the director and star free rein creatively had worked out brilliantly; The Incredible Hulk was demonstrating the risks of that approach.

Norton pointed out that he had been frank about his desire for an unusual amount of creative input and told the Marvel executives that they were breaking their promises. He got loud. Feige, unmoved, committed to a shorter, more commercial cut of the film, including Leterrier in the process but not Norton. (Three editors are credited on the movie: Tabaillon, Rick Shaine, and John Wright.) Although Leterrier’s moviemaking instincts tended toward fast and frenetic, he learned from the mistakes of Tony Kaye and made strenuous efforts not to take the conflict personally, and to be diplomatic in public. “It’s as much Marvel’s fault as it is Edward’s,” the director said. “And my fault. It’s everybody’s fault! Or no one’s fault, in a way. I regret that [Marvel and Norton] didn’t come to an agreement where we could’ve all worked together.” Norton cut back on his promotional appearances for the film to the contractually mandated minimum, likely to the benefit of all parties.

Feige, normally a staunch believer in keeping quiet about behind-the-scenes disagreements, did not extend that policy to Norton. In what stands as the frankest public statement he made during the first ten years of Marvel Studios, he issued a press release in 2010 that dismissed Norton from the role while name-checking most of the studio’s other stars: We have made the decision to not bring Edward Norton back to portray the title role of Bruce Banner in the Avengers. Our decision is definitely not one based on monetary factors, but instead rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members. The Avengers demands players who thrive working as part of an ensemble, as evidenced by Robert, Chris H, Chris E, Sam, Scarlett, and all of our talented casts. We are looking to announce a name actor who fulfills these requirements, and is passionate about the iconic role in the coming weeks. “Yeah, which was cheap,” Norton said. “It was brand defensiveness or something. Ultimately they weren’t going for long, dark and serious. But it doesn’t matter. We had positive discussions about going on with the films, and we looked at the amount of time that would’ve taken, and I wasn’t going to do that. I honestly would’ve wanted more money than they’d have wanted to pay me. But that’s not why I would’ve wanted to do another Hulk movie anyway. I went and did all the other things I wanted to do, and what Kevin Feige has done is ...

Now Feige was returning to Palm Springs with Kyle (who had recently moved from animation to live action), Broussard, and Latcham. With armfuls of their favorite DVDs and comic books, the four producers planned to lock themselves in a rental house and figure out what movies would come next. (Broussard was a little distracted: postproduction for The Incredible Hulk had been difficult, and two weeks before the movie’s release date, the visual effects were still being finalized.) They went to see Iron Man at a local theater, the first time any of them had gotten to experience it with a crowd of civilians.

The weekend of Iron Man’s premiere, David Maisel and Kevin Feige took Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. out to Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills, an upscale Chinese restaurant decorated with art by Andy Warhol. To celebrate the movie’s boffo box office, Maisel had something to offer his director and his star beyond the black pepper lobster: he had gotten permission from Ike Perlmutter to buy each of them their dream car. Even the obsessively frugal Perlmutter understood the importance of keeping Favreau and Downey happy. 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.

It took two months to agree on terms, but in July 2008, Favreau agreed to direct the sequel. Downey also signed up after renegotiating his contract. He had played Tony Stark in the first movie at a discount rate for action-movie leading men, reportedly earning around $500,000, but he got a vastly improved payday on Iron Man 2, in the neighborhood of ten million dollars, and negotiated even more money for Iron Man 3. More significantly, he committed to an Avengers movie in exchange for another ten million dollars plus a healthy slice of the profits, which would turn out to be a brilliant move. Marvel Entertainment was willing to pay so much for Downey because Iron Man 2 was a safer bet than Thor or Captain America, following Maisel’s axiom that sequels to hit movies perform roughly as well as their predecessors.

Terrence Howard, however, was no longer playing Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes, Tony’s best pal and liaison at the US Air Force—and not by his choice. “There was no explanation,” Howard complained. “Apparently the contracts that we write and sign aren’t worth the paper that they’re printed on sometimes. Promises aren’t kept.” As the first actor to sign up for the original Iron Man, Howard had commanded a premium, with his prestige as a recent Oscar nominee establishing the movie as a credible project and earning him roughly $3.5 million for a supporting role (seven times Downey’s reported salary). Now Marvel no longer needed his expensive veneer of respectability, but Howard blamed Downey’s renegotiated deal: “The person that I helped become Iron Man,” he said, “when it was time to re-up for the second one, [he] took the money that was supposed to go to me.”

Cheadle was reportedly paid around $1 million for his work on Iron Man 2; Howard’s deal would have netted him somewhere between $5 million and $8 million. 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

Rourke helped design Vanko’s many tattoos, collected over his years in a Russian prison. This caused a minor kerfuffle after the movie was cut together and Feige noticed a tattoo on Vanko’s neck that read “LOKI.” Favreau explained it wasn’t an allusion to the antagonist in the upcoming Thor movie, but a tribute to one of Rourke’s dogs, which had died just before filming started. Feige insisted that the tattoo couldn’t appear in the movie—it would be confusing to audiences—so the visual effects team had to erase the tattoo digitally in each of Vanko’s scenes (although eagle-eyed fans nevertheless spotted it in a few flickering appearances). Rourke also hired whip coaches, had his mouth fitted with gold teeth, and traveled the world to delve into Vanko’s past. The week before he began filming with Rourke, Favreau said that he had met with the actor only once, but that Rourke had been phoning him and texting him from Russia. “He took it upon himself to fly to Russia and go to prison, which I thought showed some commitment. He keeps faxing me lines that he wants to translate into Russian that he wants to say to his cockatoo, and I say, ‘That’s your prerogative.’ ”

“I wanted to bring some other layers and colors, not just make this Russian a complete murderous revenging bad guy,” Rourke later said. Although he had been able to do this to his satisfaction on the set, he said that, despite his best efforts, most of the nuances of his performance had been clipped out of the movie. “Marvel just wanted a one-dimensional bad guy,” he griped. “If you’re working for the wrong studio or, let’s say, a director that doesn’t have any balls, then they’re just gonna want it to be the evil bad guy.”

BECAUSE IRON MAN 2 HAD started filming without a final script, and because Downey’s spontaneous approach had paid off the first time, the actor now had even more freedom to ad-lib on the set. His quick-witted patter helped infuse Tony Stark with the intelligence and charm that audiences loved. The downside was that sometimes during the shooting day, the actors’ improvisations would send the plot careening in new directions and then Theroux would have to spend the night revising the screenplay, trying to make sense of it all. The stress was so great that Theroux’s back gave out and, for a time, he was confined to his bed.

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 ‘Mjölnir’? I see that it’s made out of some metal called ‘Uru.’ Could we call it Uru instead? Or would the fanboys string me up?’ Kevin [Feige] just gave his little half-smile: ‘Ken, the fanboys would string you up.’ ‘Alright. We won’t be doing that, then.’

He described Branagh’s reaction immediately following a meeting with Natalie Portman. “He was very taken with her,” Stentz said. “Not in a romantic way, but with her intelligence. Jane is a physicist, and we needed someone who could convey that intelligence. That’s what struck him about her: he said, forgive me, ‘Because the last thing we need is nuclear physicist Denise Richards.’

In the name of continuity, Marvel Studios revived another practice from the old Hollywood system: signing actors to long-term contracts, typically for nine movies. While the immediate justification was that Marvel needed its superheroes on call for crossovers and team-ups, the underlying motivation was financial. After Downey used the success of Iron Man to negotiate gargantuan paydays, Marvel Studios wanted the cost certainty of young talent locked into affordable multiyear deals. (That was another reason Finn didn’t focus on the biggest possible name for each role.)

Chris Hemsworth had short brown hair, a clean-shaven face, and a Starfleet-slick American accent. Marvel Studios let him read for Thor but passed. Soon after, he went to Vancouver to shoot the horror movie Cabin in the Woods. Director Drew Goddard and producer Joss Whedon, who had encouraged him to pursue Thor, saw trade-magazine articles about the top contenders for the role and couldn’t help but notice that Chris wasn’t among them. “Why aren’t you in the mix here?” they asked. “What happened?” “I don’t know,” he told them. “I blew my audition, I guess.” Spurred on by Goddard and Whedon, and fueled by sibling rivalry—“frustration that my little brother had gotten further than me,” he said—he agitated for a second chance. (Liam had gotten far enough into the audition process that he did one round of Thor tests in a borrowed Pepper Potts wig.)

Marvel Studios invited Evans to a meeting. “Bringing him in, showing him the artwork, showing him what was happening in this movie,” Feige recalled. They offered him a nine-movie deal for Steve Rogers, no audition required. “He took a weekend to decide,” Feige said. “That weekend was tough.” Evans made his decision and, once again, the answer was no. “Getting the offer felt, to me, like the epitome of temptation,” the actor explained. “The ultimate job offer, on the biggest scale. I’m supposed to say no to this thing. It felt like the right thing to do. You see the pictures, and you see the costumes, and it’s cool. But I’d now woken up the day after saying no and felt good—twice.” Evans added, “I like my privacy. The good thing about movies is there’s a lot of freedom built in: you make a film and then you have time off. If one of those films hits and changes your life, you have the opportunity to . . . run away. If you want to. Take some time, reassess, and regroup.”

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 garbage.”

FINN IDENTIFIED the casting of another Chris as her proudest moment in her long career at Marvel: she realized that Chris Pratt could play Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy, the 2014 movie directed by James Gunn about a gang of reluctantly heroic outer-space misfits. Pratt was famous as the dimwitted goofball Andy Dwyer on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, but Finn remembered the spark he had shown in his audition for Captain America years earlier: “I was so excited, and I went to James [Gunn], and he said, ‘Chris Pratt, no way, he’s totally wrong.’