What’s up with the MCU? A new book chronicles Marvel Studios’ reign and stumbles

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After nearly $30 billion in box office grosses, multiple Disney+ shows and untold toy sales, it’s weird to think of the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a scrappy independent film.

But that’s kind of what 2008’s “Iron Man” was, with its $140-million production budget and loose, improvisational style, years before the franchise became a multidimensional web of interconnected plotlines and corporate synergy fueling the Walt Disney Co.

In the new book, “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” Joanna Robinson (a writer and prolific podcaster for the Ringer), Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards chronicle how a floundering comic book publisher grew into a money-printing movie-making machine.

The book, which publishes Tuesday, traces the film juggernaut’s origins from Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s, eventually leading up to a pivotal meeting at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., where executive David Maisel pitched Marvel’s mercurial chief Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter on the idea to build a true studio. From relatively humble beginnings, the firm elevated its B-list heroes (it didn’t own the film rights to Spider-Man or the X-Men) and became Hollywood’s dominant hitmaker.

Today, Marvel is in a different position than it was when “Avengers: Endgame” conquered the world in 2019. As the studio stretched itself to create shows for streaming, the quality lost its consistency. For some recent installments, box office suffered. Certain analysts — not just wishful-thinking movie critics — are now taking the old “superhero fatigue” chestnut seriously.

Robinson doesn’t dwell on those challenges, but she and her co-authors don’t totally breeze past them either. I spoke with Robinson to find out what she learned about the studio and the state of Earth’s mightiest entertainment brand.

Edited for length and clarity.

In your work for the Ringer, you typically come at superhero content from the fan perspective. Did you know from the outset that this was going to be a business book?

I think what we wound up doing is creating something that hits all levels. I think there’s stuff in there for fans, going behind the scenes of their favorite movies. There’s also stuff in there for skeptics, people who don’t really like Marvel or are a little unsure about how they’re doing in 2023.

But the business stuff is really interesting. I always like to know, who’s making the story, who’s controlling the story, who has the final say in which heroes are going to be put in front of us? That’s always something I’m curious about. So when we set out to make this book, I was already interested in characters like Ike Perlmutter, who was the head of Marvel and was sort of this hero of the Marvel bankruptcy in the ‘90s, but then kind of becomes the villain of the MCU story.

Much of the book shows a battle for power between Marvel’s upstart Hollywood group and Perlmutter, along with a collection of folks known as the Marvel Creative Committee, who would often put up roadblocks. How did Perlmutter and his allies influence the trajectory of the MCU?

Until [Marvel Studios head] Kevin Feige made Disney so much money that Disney CEO Bob Iger intervened, that is the struggle. There are shouting matches and all this behind-the-scenes tension. Ike Perlmutter is an incredibly private, mysterious person. There are stories of him going to premieres in disguise. He’s pals with Donald Trump. All of that is such a curious element of this Marvel story.

He’s the one who greenlit the creation of Marvel Studios in the first place. And once they’re making all the money out on the West Coast, and they’re the ones putting the shine on the Marvel brand, that’s when Marvel East Coast is like, “Oh, we want to have a say in this now.”

I do want to make clear that there are some great folks who were on the Creative Committee. But some people on the committee were sort of speaking for the wishes of Ike Perlmutter, and that caused a lot of conflict with Marvel Studios.

And Perlmutter’s whole thing is that they are doing this Hollywood stuff in order to sell toys.

To give him some benefit doubt, he comes to Marvel in the ‘90s when Marvel is bankrupt. So of course, if you go through something like that, you’re gonna be risk averse. So he just takes this idea of “risk averse” to extremes, and in his mind, the surefire winner for the toy business is to put young-ish, good-looking white men at the front of your stories. That’s what he thinks “moves plastic.”

And as you tell it, that kind of thinking stands in the way of something like “Black Panther” getting made, which is one of the reasons Iger sidelined Perlmutter in favor of Feige.

It’s not just the executives who have a say in this franchise. There’s a point in the book where Chris Hemsworth, after playing Thor in a few movies, is feeling like he’s in a rut and comes to Marvel’s Kevin Feige to ask for help. What happened there?

Thor starts out as this sort of Shakespearean riff in the first movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh. But with the sequel, “Thor: The Dark World,” you get an installment that many people consider one of the weaker ones in the entire MCU, unfortunately for Thor.

So Hemsworth comes to Kevin Feige and says, I feel like I’m drowning in this role. He’s done a few other projects, like the “Ghostbusters” film, where he gets to play comedy. And he’s like, can we do something different? And that’s how you get “Thor: Ragnarok.”

Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios have this approach of, best idea wins. Listen to everyone. One of my favorite stories is, there’s this line in “Ragnarok” where Thor sees the Hulk and says, “He’s a friend from work.” And apparently that was the idea of a kid who was visiting a set, and they put it in the movie and every trailer. You never know where the next great idea is going to come from. That’s been one of Marvel’s key philosophies that have helped them succeed.

Even the poorly received entries, like “The Incredible Hulk” and “Thor: The Dark World,” eventually get their due with callbacks in future movies. Why is Kevin Feige so interested in pulling in those elements, even from Marvel’s failures?

I think one of the smartest things he’s done is this approach that I like to call “Feige fix-it.” If there’s a weak spot in the timeline, Marvel will sort of wrap its arms around it and embrace it and bring it into the larger continuity. I think it’s really smart to not deny or shun or reject your stumbles, but to sort of strengthen them in retrospect by making them important to the larger, more successful stories that you’re telling.

With the rapid pace of the movies and the Disney+ shows, we’ve started to see some strain showing in the quality of the productions, according to many critics. How is Marvel addressing that problem?

There were some rumblings with “Eternals” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” But “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” was really a turning point in terms of the larger fandom asking, “What’s going on here?”

Bob Iger was responsible for the Disney+ launch and the idea that Marvel would not just make two or three movies a year, but now also make all of these shows, and that’s sort of when the wheels started to come off.

Bob Iger leaves, Bob Chapek comes in, and then Iger comes back and Iger is like, let’s turn off some of these taps. We’re gonna make less, we’re gonna make fewer sequels and we’re going to concentrate on making them great. Which is exactly what I want Marvel to do.

The pace of the franchise has also put a lot of strain on the VFX community, which is struggling under the workload and moving to unionize as a result.

A really key part of this whole story is the VFX question. But that’s also just a larger industry issue, right? The oppressive demands on the VFX industry as we move further and further into these digital realms. There’s just not enough VFX artists in the world to keep up with everything that Hollywood is demanding of them.

It’s interesting to go back to the first “Iron Man,” because, as you write, Jon Favreau and his team didn’t have a complete script when they were shooting it.

We talked to hundreds of people for this book, but a lot of people worked on “Iron Man,” and anyone you talk to, they remember it fondly as this scrappy independent film, almost. East Coast Marvel was not paying that much attention to them. They were seen as this weird, little Hollywood experiment.

We shouldn’t overblow it. There were four talented screenwriters who worked on the “Iron Man” story. But in terms of, like, the lines, that was something that Favreau and Downey and the screenwriters on set would sort of work out together the night before, sometimes. Jeff Bridges [who played antagonist Obadiah Stane] is on record as not being particularly delighted by this sort of approach. But that looser approach really does work for someone like Robert Downey Jr.

Much of the franchise seems to hang on Jonathan Majors playing the villain, Kang the Conqueror. He’s about to be on trial for misdemeanor assault in New York (Majors has denied the allegations). How is Marvel working through that uncertainty?

I’ve been asking folks over there, and I feel like they’re really in a wait-and-see position right now. They’re wanting to wait to see how the trial proceeds. Marvel, historically, hasn’t been very reactive to public sentiment. This is a far more extreme case than they’ve ever encountered before. But if I have to look to the past for guidance ... it’s going to be their own internal compass that’s going to dictate what they do going forward.

Have we seen peak Marvel? Will it ever reach the heights of critical acclaim and cultural power that it has in the past?

I’m disinclined to count Marvel out, because I think a lot of people have made that mistake in the past. One of the favorite phrases of 2023 is “superhero fatigue.” But also we’ve been hearing the phrase for, I would say, five-plus years now, right? So I used to roll my eyes. In the past, it just seemed like critics were trying to will something into existence. This year, I’m taking it a little bit more seriously.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see “Endgame” happen again. But that has almost more to do with the larger way we ingest stories or the monoculture in general. “House of the Dragon” comes along from HBO. Is it still very popular? Yes. But it doesn’t feel like we’re ever going to see another “Game of Thrones.” I don’t think it’s a Marvel question. I think it’s a larger cultural question.

Stuff we wrote

— It’s done. WGA members easily ratify new contract. The Writers Guild of America’s membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new contract with Hollywood studios that ended a 148-day strike, with 99% casting their approval.

— Julia Ormond sues Weinstein for assault and says top CAA agents enabled him. The actor filed a lawsuit against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, saying he assaulted her and that CAA and Disney enabled his misconduct.

— DreamWorks Animation cut 70 jobs in latest industry reduction. NBCUniversal’s “Puss in Boots” studio laid off employees as part of “an overall cost reduction,” reducing its workforce by about 4%. The company follows other entertainment-related businesses that have cut staff in the midst of fewer productions.

— What’s really inside the Hollywood writers’ deal? Here’s the juicy stuff. A team of Los Angeles Times journalists analyzed the Writers Guild of America’s contract with studios, marking it up line by line. See the most significant changes, the pivotal arguments and the key subtexts within this historic document.

— ICYMI. SAG-AFTRA, major studios continue negotiations. Ducking Taylor Swift, ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ tops box office.

Number of the week

Guess who’s back? Billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz is reviving his proxy fight with the Walt Disney Co., with his hedge fund Trian Fund Management boosting its stake to about 30 million shares, valued at roughly $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Neither Trian nor Disney has commented yet.

Peltz abandoned a previous effort to join the Disney board after CEO Bob Iger promised a vast cost-cutting plan for the company, including 7,000 job cuts. The strategy is expected to surpass the earlier projected $5.5 billion in savings. Peltz was vocal in his support of that plan, and it’s not clear yet what he wants the company to do differently now. The stock is down about 11% compared with a year ago.

Film shoots

Writers are back. Production is not, according to the latest FilmLA figures.

Best of the web

— The whole Taylor Swift-NFL cross-promotion thing is getting real weird. (Vox)

— Related: Swift’s Eras Tour concert movie has generated $100 million in box office sales, and it hasn’t even opened yet. (CNBC)

— Comedians only care about comedy? Debatable, but OK! (The Atlantic)

— What’s going on with celebrity-backed production companies? Were they worth it? (The Ankler)

— Missed this one from last month, but it’s relevant: Which streaming services cancel shows at the highest rate? (Variety)

Finally ...

If you need a pick-me-up, Martin Scorsese trying to guess the meanings of various Gen Z internet slang terms on his daughter’s TikTok should do the trick. I’ll admit it, this was the first time I’d encountered the phrase “sneaky link,” so the “Killers of the Flower Moon” director is hardly alone in his bafflement here.