MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

As Perlman had expected, she wasn’t the last writer on the movie; over the summer, Chris McCoy had punched up her draft. Then the director immediately started rewriting it to reflect his own sensibility. “I don’t think there’s a huge difference between writing and directing a film—not for me,” he said. “When you’re directing, it’s just putting the visual aspect to it.” He allowed that Perlman “definitely got the ball rolling,” but didn’t give her much credit beyond that. “The original concept was there, that was sort of like what’s in the movie, and then there’s the story and the characters—those were pretty much recreated by me.” Once again, a Marvel movie ended up in a WGA arbitration. The official ruling was that both Gunn and Perlman had contributed significantly and that they would share the screenplay credit equally. Gunn wasn’t pleased: “In Nicole’s script everything is pretty different . . . the story is different . . . the character arcs are different. It’s not about the same stuff. But that’s how the WGA works. They like first writers an awful lot.”