MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

Marvel also introduced Pratt to nutritionist Philip Goglia, who increased Pratt’s caloric intake to 4,000 a day, plus one glass of water for each pound the actor weighed. “I was peeing all day long, every day,” Pratt said. “That part was a nightmare.” Within six months, Pratt had sculpted himself into a superhero. The writers of Parks and Recreation had written a scene for season seven where his character, Andy Dwyer, needed to take his shirt off. “We realized we couldn’t do it,” said showrunner Michael Schur. “Andy is not a guy who has a perfectly constructed human form with ripped abs and gigantic biceps.”

SOME METHODS OF bulking up go beyond weight training and diet. Though forbidden by sports leagues, many steroid treatments are perfectly legal. Dr. Todd Schroeder, associate professor of clinical physical therapy and director of the University of Southern California Clinical Exercise Research Center at the USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, estimated that over half of Marvel’s stars use some form of performance enhancing drug (PED) to get the physiques they want. “At least for the short term,” he said. “I would say that fifty to seventy-five percent do.” For an in-depth 2013 investigation into the industry’s most popular performance-enhancing drug, human growth hormone (HGH), the Hollywood Reporter interviewed a number of talent agents and managers who considered PED use the “worst-kept” secret in Hollywood—just as commonplace, perhaps, as Botox and Restylane.

While the first cohort of writers was expected to work regular hours, nine to five, their supervisor, Broussard, got pulled into production for Captain America: The First Avenger, and the studio’s leaders—Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria Alonso—were too busy with movies in production to check in on the program. Left to their own devices, some days the writers would just sit around talking about movies and reading old comic books. They knew to keep an eye out for a good Doctor Strange story, since the character was one of Feige’s favorites. Other days, they would go across the street to a Barnes and Noble bookstore and work there for a while, just for a change of scenery. This would be unthinkable a few years later, when Marvel would tighten up its security protocols to prevent secrets from leaking.

SOME OF THE IDEAS developed in the Writers Program went nowhere; many of them turned into something else along the way. Hulu commissioned Runaways as a TV series and ABC Family (operating as Freeform) launched a Cloak & Dagger show. The characters of Luke Cage and Iron Fist each got a TV series (on Netflix), as did the Inhumans (on ABC). The Writers Program eventually became a source of tension inside the company, with the Creative Committee trying to exert closer supervision over it. The company’s Los Angeles executives shut it down in 2014. (It was revived in 2016.) But even though it lasted for only two years in its original incarnation, the Marvel Writers Program didn’t just let some talented young writers stow away on a spaceship, it gave them a chance to fly it. Some of the writers earned their wings and stuck around for years. Although his Inhumans movie didn’t go into production, Joe Robert Cole cowrote the screenplay for Black Panther and its sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, movies on which Nate Moore served as executive producer. Eric Pearson became a steady contributor to the MCU, working on the screenplays for Black Widow and Thor: Ragnarok, not to mention a host of uncredited script polishes.

Whedon insisted on writing the screenplay himself. “There was a script,” Whedon conceded. “There just wasn’t a script I was going to film a word of.” That initial Avengers screenplay was by Zak Penn, who was shunted aside again, just as he had been when Edward Norton signed on to The Incredible Hulk. “All the other directors we had been talking about, Joss wasn’t on the list,” Penn said. “I heard he was going to rewrite the script himself. He didn’t even want to meet with me—which, by the way, I always call the writer I’m replacing. I feel like that’s courtesy.”

That snub was particularly painful because Penn had known Whedon for a long time; they were both Wesleyan graduates. Thinking that maybe the situation was uncomfortable for Whedon, too, Penn called him up. “He said to me, ‘No, it’s not awkward for me. I’m rewriting you,’ ” Penn recalled. “It became pretty apparent that he had less than zero interest in, in any way, having me involved with the movie.” Penn said that he balked when Whedon told him to take his name off the screenplay that he had spent years developing: “My kids have grown up while I’ve been working on it. They’ve all told their friends about it. What’s going to happen when their friends are like, ‘Your dad didn’t work on Avengers’?” Whedon’s response, according to Penn: “What’s going to happen when my kids think that you wrote half the story?” Penn didn’t appreciate being booted off a Marvel movie yet again, although in this case, at least it was by an acclaimed writer, not the lead actor. “I think he’s a dick. I think he’s a bad person, and it was really surprising,” Penn said of Whedon. “Remember, my bonus is based on my credit. So literally millions and millions of dollars, which is not the issue here, but that just came out of my pocket and went into Joss’s pocket.”

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.

In late April, the Avengers actors convened in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the same state where Thor had been shot for tax reasons. Evans and Johansson had become friendly when they costarred in the 2004 movie The Perfect Score (a dud about high-school seniors stealing advance copies of the SATs), and on location they would play Game Boy together or sometimes find an evening to go out dancing. Evans became the off-camera leader of the team. When he summoned the actors to meet at a local bar, he sent group texts with the message “Avengers Assemble.” Ruffalo and Samuel L. Jackson both showed up in Albuquerque one day early. Jackson wanted to file a complaint. When Whedon had consulted with Jackson before writing the screenplay, the then-sixty-two-year-old actor had made only one request about Nick Fury: he didn’t want to run. But now he pulled out his script and pointed to a stage direction where Fury ran onto the deck of the Helicarrier with a rocket launcher. “What’s this say here? It says I run!” “Just that once,” Whedon assured him. “You only run once.” Jackson called Whedon a “motherfucker,” which felt like an official benediction from the actor who used that four-syllable word better than anyone else on the planet.

The Marvel pre-viz approach prompted some MCU directors to take pains to emphasize their own contributions—effectively telling the world that they had actually directed the biggest sequences in their own movies. Chloe Zhao, who directed Eternals, declared, “My God, for a year and a half, three times a week for a couple hours a day, I was sitting in front of a big screen making decisions for every detail of how visual effects could look in the real world.”

According to Pearce, “Shane stood up himself and said, ‘I’ve been working with him all week. I’ve found him to be both a gentleman and a man of honor, and I would be happy to write Iron Man 3 with him.’ And then what’s crazy is, between then and two and a half years later, when the movie came out, no one else touched a keyboard on Iron Man 3 other than Shane or I.” It was one Marvel movie that didn’t end up with a WGA arbitration.

The open secret of Marvel Studios was that Kevin Feige was a shadow director for all its movies. His hands-on approach to shaping and refining every installment of the MCU extended well beyond that of a typical studio executive—and even exceeded the creative involvement of most producers. The system worked well enough as long as the directors he hired played along and there weren’t too many projects demanding his attention.

“Galaxy in some ways is the best Marvel movie ever,” Robert Downey Jr. conceded. “And it’s odd for someone with—on occasion—an ego the size of mine to actually say that.”

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.”

She threw a party when the movie came out literally called the ‘Fuck James Gunn’ party because she had won that very bruising credit arbitration. The thing that I’m still angry about, and I say this as a fan of James Gunn as a director, was that he very clearly was selectively leaking stuff to his friends and the fanboy media circles to undermine her credit. When Matthew Vaughn decided to have a temper tantrum over the fact that we got screen credit [on X-Men: First Class], at least he did it under his own name.”

The image of the 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.

Marvel Entertainment pored over the bills from Marvel Studios’ office spaces, from the kite factory to the Beverly Hills Mercedes-Benz lot to Manhattan Beach, leading to cost-saving measures that left the working environment, as one Marvel screenwriter called it, “shithole-adjacent.” When distributor Chris Fenton visited the office, he described it, more tactfully, as “unassuming and a bit disheveled.” The reception area had no seats, so Fenton was told to wait in a conference room furnished with a large table and a dozen chairs. “None of them matched,” he observed. Fenton sat down in one chair, which collapsed underneath him. “Shit,” the receptionist said, “I forgot to warn you about the chairs.” When Marvel’s films went into preproduction on studio lots, staffers would smuggle in drinks and snacks from the offices of other productions on the same lot, because the cupboards at Marvel were always bare. Office managers weren’t allowed to order boxes of Kleenex; employees were expected to use their napkins from lunch if they needed to blow their noses.

When producer Jodi Hildebrand started working in the Marvel Studios office, she 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.

Portman had signed on to the Thor sequel specifically because of Jenkins’s involvement; she took pride in helping to expand the opportunities in Hollywood for women. When Jenkins left the movie, Portman was contractually obligated to continue, but she declared herself done with the franchise, not even making time for reshoots. When the movie needed to shoot a climactic kiss, the production conscripted Chris Hemsworth’s real-life wife Elsa Pataky (who wore a long brunette wig for the scene).

To take over the troubled project, Marvel Studios hired director Alan Taylor, best known for his work on TV programs such as The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. According to Taylor, the Marvel executives mostly left him alone during the shoot, but that changed during postproduction. The Creative Committee was convinced that Loki didn’t get enough screen time and that his scenes weren’t much fun. The solution was to airlift Joss Whedon from the Avengers editing room to the Dark World studios in London so he could rewrite all the Loki scenes for reshoots. The opening scene of Loki in chains was part of those reshoots—otherwise the popular character wouldn’t have appeared until nearly an hour into the film.

Taylor made no friends at Marvel Studios during his time there. “Kevin is an all-powerful force, but films at the end of the day live and die by the director,” said Kyle. “Sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn’t, and The Dark World speaks very much to the unfortunate side of the wrong person for the wrong franchise.”

Back in 2006, Feige had made his first presentation at the San Diego Comic-Con to a half-empty room. “Absolutely nobody cared,” one fan recalled. “Everybody was trying to get into the Spider-Man 3 panel instead. They had an Iron Man teaser poster signing with Jon Favreau and they practically couldn’t give them away.” Onstage, Feige wore an oversized button-down shirt that made him look like a kid dressing up as a studio president. Eight years later, Feige had figured out his day-to-day uniform, and rarely appeared in public dressed any other way. “He’ll still have his baseball cap and his sneakers on and a sports jacket thrown over a Marvel or Disney T-shirt,” Chris Hemsworth said affectionately of Feige. “He’s like a fanboy with such an open honesty and warmth to him that you don’t usually find with people who are as successful and established as he is.”

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. The middle act, as Whedon conceived it, features Thor and Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) searching for more information about the Infinity Stones, while the rest of the Avengers recuperate at Hawkeye’s farmhouse but are subjected to individual nightmares, courtesy of Wanda. “The dreams were not an executive favorite,” Whedon said. “The dreams, the farmhouse—these were things I fought to keep.”

In 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. They gave Feige a way to guarantee that individual MCU installments would fold easily into the larger saga. “Kevin says, ‘We are writing this film until they rip it out of our hands,’ ” reported Craig Kyle. “He is not kidding. Doesn’t matter how many drafts we have of that script—while we’re shooting, our job is to continually go back to those old drafts and say, ‘Is there a line? Is there a moment that we missed?’ Once it’s all shot, then the pieces come home.”

By “home,” Kyle was referring to Marvel HQ in Los Angeles, where Feige would pore over footage and rough cuts to poke and prod and find the missing magic that made a Marvel movie sing. “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.’ ”

Unwittingly, Whedon was aiding the arguments of the Creative Committee, which was convinced that any problems with Age of Ultron stemmed from Feige refusing to bring the director to heel, or to demand that Whedon implement the Committee’s notes. Whedon would not be the czar for Phase Three of the MCU; he would not direct any more movies for Marvel. One of Feige’s cardinal rules for Marvel Studios was Don’t air your problems publicly. And Whedon broke it.

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.”

Marvel Studios was ambitious in the scope of its storytelling, 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.)

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. The story hadn’t changed significantly, but swaths of dialogue had been altered, and references to the wider MCU had been shoehorned in. Wright hated the new script and felt betrayed by its very existence: he and Cornish believed that they had been working in good faith to address Marvel’s notes and find a middle ground. The efforts of Marvel Studios to push the process forward so Wright could start shooting the movie had backfired spectacularly. On May 23rd, the studio and the director announced they had parted ways “due to differences in their visions of the film.”

A few years later, Wright tried to give a polite overview of where things had gone wrong. “I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie,” he said. “Having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward. Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”

Rudd and McKay agreed to revise the screenplay together, as quickly as possible, while Marvel searched for a new director. For the first time since Edward Norton on The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Studios was paying a movie star to rewrite the film he would be headlining. McKay and Rudd sequestered themselves in a series of hotel rooms, periodically getting a change of scenery by flying to a new city. According to McKay, “It was like six to eight weeks: we just ground it out and did a giant rewrite of the script. I was really proud of what we did. I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright.”

Feige went so far as to explain that Ant-Man was no longer the first movie in Phase Three of the MCU; it was now the last movie of Phase Two. “The truth is, the phases mean a lot to me,” Feige said. “Civil War is the start of Phase Three. It just is.”

Although Kevin Feige was not involved in the development of the film, it was nominally a Marvel Studios coproduction, and so Pascal periodically reached out to get his feedback. Feige sent notes laying out his concerns with the movie, including his worries that Andrew Garfield’s performance was scattershot and emotionally inconsistent. He particularly criticized the “special blood” plotline, which had been revived: We’re distracted by the idea that Peter became Spider-Man b/c of his father’s blood—all this special back story with his super-scientist dad fights with the idea that Peter is normal kid from Queens who becomes the greatest super-hero in the world . . . Pascal could see for herself that the movie was overstuffed and disconnected. In an email to Doug Belgrad, president of Sony Pictures, two months before its release, she enumerated the problems: “Uneven, schizo tone . . . weird, disjointed, no one single great set piece because action is just big and not storytelling, not funny . . . if I’m really honest, wrong director and wrong casting.” She concluded, “We will almost get away with it and we can never go back.”

Feige replied, “I’m not good at that—giving advice and leaving.” He made his pitch: he knew that Pascal and Sony were struggling with how to go forward with Spider-Man but believed that Marvel Studios knew how to handle the character. Feige told her, “The only way I know how to do anything is to just do it entirely. So why don’t you let us do it. Don’t think of it as two studios. And don’t think of it as giving another studio back the rights. No change of hands of rights. No change of hands of money. Just engage us to produce it. Just pretend it’s like what DC did with Christopher Nolan. I’m not saying we’re Nolan, but I am saying there is a production company that is doing this pretty well. Just engage the services of that production company to make the movie.” Pascal did not respond well to Feige’s proposal. More specifically, she threw her sandwich at him and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

Marvel brought its two top contenders, Holland and Asa Butterfield (Ender’s Game), to Atlanta, where Civil War was already filming, for a screen test with Robert Downey Jr. Since Pascal and Feige were planning to show a close relationship between Tony Stark and Peter Parker, a chemistry test seemed vital. Pascal said that it was usually hard to watch people screen-test with Downey, since the actor had a natural penchant for stealing scenes, but Holland more than held his own. After his test, Downey walked over to the monitor where Feige and Pascal were watching and gave them an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Holland was in.

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 movie’s most poignant lines (“Please, sir, I don’t want to go”—dialogue improvised by Holland) before he dematerializes in Stark’s arms.

At some point in 2016, Boseman was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer; he kept his condition secret. Only a few of his closest associates knew, including his producing partner Logan Coles, his longtime agent Michael Greene, and his personal trainer Addison Henderson. During the production of Black Panther, Coogler was not aware of his leading man’s serious health condition. Boseman’s brother Derrick said that Boseman didn’t want people to worry about him; the actor also appears to have been confident that he was going to beat cancer and didn’t want the diagnosis to stop his work or even slow it down. That wasn’t the vanity of a man looking for more time in the spotlight, but the intensity of an artist who believed in the importance of the role he was playing.

As in the comics, Thanos would eliminate fifty percent of all life in the universe in a Malthusian coup. The Avengers wouldn’t just lose but would see half their members evaporate into dust. To determine who would get eliminated when Thanos snapped his fingers, Feige convened Markus, McFeely, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, and executive producer Trinh Tran in a conference room strewn with cards, slightly larger than baseball cards, each with the name and photograph of one of the MCU characters available for the movie (that is, all of them). The back of each card showed the salary and contractual status of the actor who played the character. “We didn’t know how much [money] each actor made, but it had either one dollar sign or up to five dollar signs,” McFeely said. Were the actors already under contract, or would Marvel need to make a new deal to feature them in the movies? Sometimes the cards were shuffled around on a table and sometimes they were tacked up on a whiteboard, but they were used to play just one game, called Who Lives and Who Dies.

A couple of weeks before Downey was scheduled to film additional footage for Endgame—reshoots that would include him saying the final “I am Iron Man” line—Joe Russo had dinner with the actor and discovered that his star was reluctant to film Tony Stark’s dying moment again: “He was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want to go back and get into that emotional state. It’ll take . . . it’s hard.’ And crazily enough, Joel Silver, the producer, was at the dinner. He’s an old buddy of Robert’s. And Joel jumps in and he’s like, ‘Robert, what are you talking about? That’s the greatest line I’ve ever heard! You gotta say this line! You have to do this!’ So thank God that Joel Silver was at dinner, because he helped us talk Robert into doing that line.” That scene, with Tony’s last words, ended up being the final shot of reshoots. It was filmed in a soundstage next door to the studio where, a decade earlier, Downey had auditioned to play Iron Man, gliding into the role like a kid on a bicycle going downhill. Kevin Feige watched the scene, thinking about how much his life, and Downey’s life, had changed since that moment.

One of the less-recognizable faces on screen was that of Ty Simpkins, who had played the kid sidekick Harley Keener in Iron Man 3 but was now a gangly teenager. While he was getting ready for baseball practice, he got a call from Louis D’Esposito, who brought him up to speed on the major plot points of Infinity War and Endgame, and casually mentioned that Tony Stark died in the movie, which meant that Keener knew about Tony’s death well before some of the MCU’s biggest stars. “Him feeling comfortable telling me one of the biggest secrets of their franchise, that’s mind-boggling to me,” Simpkins said. “They just told me that they figured that Tony’s just stayed in Harley’s life and supported him, so they thought that he should be there.”

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,” Tran said.

Rhythm & Hues, for example, had been a key contributor of CGI to Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk in 2008, but it was driven into bankruptcy by a pair of 2012 films: Snow White and the Huntsman and a movie for which it won an Academy Award, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. That movie largely took place on a lifeboat holding a teenage boy and an adult Bengal tiger; the tiger was entirely digital, created by Rhythm & Hues. The VFX house got the job for the tiger with a fixed-rate bid, meaning that it committed to a price tag before work began. When the movie was delayed and Lee wanted to change the design of the tiger in postproduction, 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.

The movie, which features Hela destroying Mjölnir and Asgard, also sends Thor to a planet where he is gang-pressed into gladiator combat, including a memorable battle against the Hulk. Thor’s line when he recognizes his opponent—“We know each other! He’s a friend from work!”—wasn’t actually contributed by any of the screenwriters (or any of the actors, whom Waititi encouraged to improvise). In perhaps the ultimate example of Marvel’s “best idea wins” philosophy, the movie’s best line was suggested by a child with cerebral palsy who spent the day on the set courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Then somebody—McKenna thought it might have been Feige—suggested that the movie could have a post-credits scene with multiple villains that would set up Sony’s Sinister Six project. “We were coming up with different storylines that would just sort of write towards a tag like that,” McKenna explained. They wrestled with how it would work until the day when Feige asked, “Remember that idea with all the villains that we were talking about for a tag? That Sinister Six idea? Why don’t we just do it in the movie?” “That just sort of blew everything open,” McKenna said.

“We both really relish the idea of doing a sitcom mom-and-pop fight, but with superheroes, but play it really real,” Bettany said. “But there did seem to be a lot of time in a harness. And time goes really slowly when you’re in a harness. There are lots of differences between Lizzie and I, and one of them’s very obvious and makes being in a harness a little more complicated for me.” Bettany guffawed. A role that had started as a few days of voiceover work playing Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. on Iron Man had become a fifteen-year job that somehow now required a mélange of emotional truth, retro comedy, and genital restriction. Such was life in the ever-expanding and unpredictable MCU in 2020.

An early pair of Marvel Studios stumbles, The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World, had once been widely accepted as the weakest MCU movies. According to Rotten Tomatoes, however, Phase Four’s Eternals and Phase Five’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania displaced them—the only two films to rank as “rotten” on the website. Phase Four’s Thor: Love and Thunder also sat low on the list, a sharp fall from grace for director Taika Waititi after his wildly popular Thor: Ragnarok. This, surely, must have rankled Feige. In 2017, when the MCU still enjoyed an unblemished record of “fresh” reviews, he said, “We always want those Rotten Tomatoes ‘Certified Fresh’ plaques, right? We take great pride in them. They send this little Lucite ‘Certified Fresh’ thing with the name of the movie on it. We got them lined up.”

In short, after a decade of nearly unrivaled success, the Marvel logo no longer ensured the level of quality that Feige had worked so hard to establish. This violated the ethos of his longtime ally Bob Iger. Back in 2017, when Marvel was still on top of the world, Iger was asked how the franchise was able to draw in so many viewers who had no history with comic books. “That’s where the brand becomes important,” he said. “That’s why the movies we’re making are: Pixar, Disney, Marvel, Star Wars. We’re not making any movies other than those, because we believe it gives us a little bit more license to tell unique stories and introduce unique characters that maybe the audience isn’t well aware of. But the brand has become of value. There are known attributes of the storytelling and the characters and that gives us a competitive advantage.”