The Sacred Timeline - MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios
The definitive chronicle of the MCU’s rise from scrappy studio to blockbuster titan
“We are far from the first writers, after all, to cover the MCU. But our ambition with this book is to tell those missing stories as part of the most thorough, authoritative history of Marvel Studios to date.”
- Prologue: Origin Story
This is a quote pulled from the beginning of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios (hereafter MCU: TRoMS) published in October 2023, by Joanna Robinson, Gavin Edwards, and Dave Gonzales.
When it comes to a study of the corporate history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), this book is the Infinity Gauntlet that collects all the elements essential for understanding how one of the biggest pop culture phenomena disrupted Hollywood conventional wisdom.
MCU: TRoMS contextualizes Marvel Studios with an understanding of Marvel: the bankrupt comic book publisher resuscitated by a toy company. The progression of the MCU is enriched with insider accounts through aggregating original interviews conducted by the authors combined with publicly published statements, and consequently pulling the curtain back on behind-the-scenes drama. The book describes how the innovative MCU model evolved with a coterie of staff writers, heavy and just-in-time usage of VFX, agile revisions, and Kevin Feige’s guiding hand. And so much more!
Each chapter, and sometimes even just short anecdotes in the book, can be deserving of a business or media school case study. There are key strategic points brought up in MCU: TRoMS that reflect how the studio prioritized empowering creatives, emphasizing emotional connection with the audience, and was forward thinking in its strategy, but also how straying from this path and overtaxing creatives has led them to its precarious position in the market. These handful of points showcase capabilities that the MCU can leverage to course correct.
Creative Committee’s Toyetic Fixation
“As Marvel Studios entered Phase Two, the Creative Committee became a production chokepoint, insisting on reading all scripts but taking longer than ever to respond to them. The notes coming out of New York coalesced around a single idea: the Marvel Cinematic Universe should exist to sell merchandise.”
- Chapter Twenty: Marvel Studios vs. the Committee
The Creative Committee at Marvel was established to maintain a level of creative oversight over the company, and in particular Kevin Feige and the MCU. It included Issac “Ike” Perlmutter, Marvel Entertainment CEO, and six people across different divisions:
Kevin Feige, Marvel Studio Chief
Louis D'Esposito, Marvel Studios Co-President
Dan Buckley, Marvel Comics' President of Publishing
Joe Quesada, Marvel's Chief Creative Officer
Brian Michael Bendis, acclaimed Marvel comic writer
Alan Fine, Marvel Entertainment President and Marvel Characters Inc. Chief Marketing Officer
In MCU: TRoMS, the Creative Committee is also an antagonist, and the quote above alludes to why. There was a constant creative schism between Feige, and in particular Perlmutter and Fine around the strategy of the MCU. The latter two wanted the MCU to produce films that were toyetic, the suitability of a media property for merchandising tie-ins.
This motivation is somewhat understandable, toys are a simpler, proven, and less capital risky business, at least compared to genre blockbuster movies which could flop. Additionally, Perlmutter resuscitated Marvel’s business from bankruptcy when Toy Biz, his toy manufacturer venture, acquired Marvel and leveraged the movies to, you guessed it, sell toys. However, the book outlines at length that the Creative Committee only wanted to make toyetic movies to a core demographic of adolescent white males, and stifled innovation if it didn’t fit this criteria, particularly with female or minority led movies.
The major strategic qualm with this is the Creative Committee’s premise is flawed. Their view is myopic in that one business is only subservient to the other. The strategy shouldn’t just be selling toys, it should be that the underlying intellectual property is nurtured, recognizable, and engenders loyalty. That way the superhero IP can enable various business models: merchandise, video games, movies, TV, etc.). This is best illustrated in my framework - the Superhero Flywheel - and I go into more detail on its construction in my previous post: Superhero Flywheel, Up, Up, and Away.
The stronger the superhero IP, the more effective you’re able to engage existing fans in holistic ways and acquire new fans. At this juncture, during Phase 2, the MCU was picking up momentum and powering this flywheel. The movies were also becoming just as lucrative as toys.
The Creative Committee should have pivoted to embrace a new high growth business as core, and branching out into new demographics. While I am by no means a toy expert like Perlmutter and Fine, their argument around shortcomings of diverse demographics cuts both ways. Yes, girls and minorities didn’t buy superhero toys as much as white adolescent males, but that might be because the former two groups didn’t have many choices in the market. Can you imagine if they did? With the power of hindsight, I’m pretty sure those Black Panther toys ended up selling pretty damn well…
Merchandising is important to how any franchise can monetize, but it is only one component of many. The flywheel is a more holistic framework than a myopic toy strategy. Ultimately, the Creative Committee lost the political battle within, and Bob Iger the CEO of Disney wrested MCU oversight from them, and dismissed Perlmutter from Disney in 2023.
Cultural Immersion and Expansion
“During preproduction, the Black Panther team made multiple trips to Africa. Carter spent time in Central Africa, while the movie’s composer, Ludwig Göransson, went on tour with the Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. Coogler and many of his department heads made a pilgrimage up the continent’s east coast, starting in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal.”
- Chapter Twenty-Three: Love Live the King
Speaking of tapping into new demographics, this anecdote is what you do when you want to connect with new customers, audiences, and fans. You hire passionate operators who champion innovative creativity. You get out of your ivory towers, and do on-the-ground field research where you ethnographically immerse yourself into all the nuanced details! Every company needs to have these practices. If you want to make an app to help truck drivers you better be at a truck stop meeting them. If you want to develop software for hospitals you need to talk to doctors, nurses, and administrators.
The groundbreaking Afrofuturistic Black Panther was supposed to spearhead a specialized corner of the MCU. A mini-franchise within the broader universe appealing to Black audiences filled with properties emulating the Black pop art vision from Black Panther, and with Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa as its leader.
Sadly, Boseman’s passing in 2020 left not only a void in this strategy, but in the MCU’s future. Black Panther was one of the heir apparents to lead the Avengers on the silver screen, and act as one of the MCU’s cinematic tent poles. However there is still promise, Eyes of Wakanda, an animated Disney+ series is premiering in 2024, and a rumored Ironheart project, who was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, still looms.
Feige was attempting to not only increase representation for fans, especially underserved ones, but to look around the economic corner by growing into new markets. It’s very common to expand to new geographies and demographics when you are saturating your core market. Marvel started developing this muscle with Black Panther, but there have been ambitions to tap into other underrepresented cultures in the superhero industry.
With Shang Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings, the MCU forayed into East Asian culture. Notably headlining the film with Hong Kong cinema legend Tony Leung as the charismatic villain Wenwu, empowering an Asian American Pacific Islander director Destin Daniel Cretton, and maintaining a Chinese aesthetic, including Mandarin dialogue, in the movie! There have been rumors of Shang Chi spinoffs. The MCU also delved into South Asian culture with their Disney+ show - Ms. Marvel. Showcasing a South Asian cast as well as folding in real historical events such as the forced migration known as the Partition of India into its plot. Asia and Asian Americans are quite large markets, and their superhero fans are up for grabs. Occasionally, the MCU makes cultural missteps, so they need to tread carefully around ethnic nuances. However, this level of hiring and empowering creatives is a step in the right direction.
As of now, the gas pedal has been eased for these cultural corner ambitions in the MCU as a more methodical approach to the velocity of projects is being evaluated by Marvel Studios. That said, the Black Panther focused chapter in the book is a microcosm of what Marvel could be capable of should it choose to seize this opportunity.
VFX Vertical Integration
“Without intending to, Marvel Studios was establishing another tradition that it would become infamous for: the crushing demands it made of its CGI artists.”
- Chapter Seven: Extraordinary Levels of Toxicity
A key reason behind the sharper scrutiny and calls for the MCU slowdown can be seen from this prescient excerpt. Throughout MCU: TRoMS, there are accounts across every MCU phase of the studio’s penchant of revising movies until the last possible moment, akin to an agile tech startup. Given that Marvel typically outsources their special effects work, this only increases the pressure and workload of their partners which already have to deal with movies that are inherently CGI heavy and uses it heavily in reshoots and to fix problems.
The visual effects (VFX) cracks have already been showing in the superhero industry as a whole in addition to the documentation in this book. There already have been numerous reports of Marvel’s VFX workers voicing their objections and artists on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse being pushed past their limits.
Inequitable working conditions and economic arrangements led to the most recent two strikes (writers and actors), and is catalyzing a VFX workers movement - the small in-house VFX team at Marvel is unionizing, Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Production workers launched their own unionization efforts, and more could follow.
The book touches on some proposed solutions to rebalance the scales: unionization, getting rid of the fixed-bid system to allow VFX companies to participate in profit sharing, or bringing more VFX in-house for Marvel Studios. Marvel should absolutely stand up a bigger VFX studio more dedicated to the MCU given it’s a franchise cornerstone for Disney. Other Disney divisions already have this: Walt Disney Animation Studio, Pixar, and Industrial Light & Magic (came with Lucasfilm acquisition). Some of these studios have already helped on MCU projects!
Vertical integration generally begets higher quality for a variety of reasons: easier cooperation between the studio, greater control over output quality, same staff on successive projects can build expertise, and more. Either Marvel Studios needs to build out their own, or Disney could share internal capabilities better (although the latter is much easier said than done, intercompany cooperation can be subject to corporate politics, misaligned incentives, and bureaucracy).
The MCU was groundbreaking for visually bringing to life the fantastical array of superpowers of Marvel superheroes, but this overtaxing VFX trajectory at the MCU is untenable. Third party teams will avoid working with Marvel Studios. Prestige is the last lure for partners, but that may not last as the luster of the MCU begins to fade.
The Campfire
“Feige took pains, Cargill realized, to include “the DNA of that campfire scene in every Marvel movie. He wants to take your favorite characters and give you the campfire scene, and give you that sequence in which you just love these people for who they are as people, regardless of their powers, so that when the big stuff happens, you really care about it.’ ””
- Chapter Twenty-Five: Snap
What gives me hope for the MCU is Kevin Feige’s guiding light which is a scene from the movie Star Trek V, where Leonard McCoy, and Spock are sitting around a campfire. The intimate conveyance of emotional and psychological experience between characters, and consequently with the audience. The heartbeat of the film. It’s also a very revelatory glimpse of Feige’s creative ethos, and how indelible small moments shape the leaders that we become.
I can feel the campfire when I think back. Tony Stark and Yinsen meeting in the cave in Iron-Man, Steve Rogers asking Erskine the night before the serum injection “why me?” in Captain America: The First Avenger, Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton on top of Vormir in Avengers: Endgame, Rocket Raccoon and his friends in their cell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
MCU: TRoMS closes with Marvel at a precarious point because of the struggles of Phase 4 and the start of Phase 5. Fans know of the criticisms of the bloated weight of the MCU and superhero fatigue, which should be a wake-up call not only for the MCU, but for the industry (I wrote more about that here: Superhero Fatigue: Is it real, is it a blessing?).
The MCU has defied the odds to get to where they’re at so far, and its history is still being written (or filmed). But for all its tribulations currently, the MCU is undoubtedly a paradigm shifter. After reading this book I have a much richer understanding of its capability to course correct - empowering creatives, nurturing IP, embracing innovation and adaptability, and storytelling with the campfire.
So…
If you want to understand how the MCU for better or for worse has become a bellwether for the superhero entertainment industry
If you want to understand how the strategy of the MCU has evolved and adapted
If you want to understand how a blockbuster titan was borne from pivotal human moments
Go read MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios!