MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

Ike Perlmutter’s main concern with The Avengers was that he wanted all the team’s members to be men. While Disney now owned Marvel, Perlmutter had become one of Disney’s largest individual stockholders; as Disney CEO Robert Iger had promised, Perlmutter was allowed to keep running Marvel as a personal fiefdom. Perlmutter knew his business—and even more than Marvel, his business was toys. He would brandish budget sheets with cherrypicked data to make his case that female action figures didn’t sell, that female-led comic books underperformed compared to top-line male heroes, and that previous movies based on female superheroes had failed at the box office. Whedon, however, insisted that the Avengers had to include at least one woman, ideally Black Widow.