Late Night Dispatch: A decade ago Disney bought Marvel. Then waited.
A $4.2 billion handshake 10 years ago irrevocably changed the world. Whether it was for better or worse is up to interpretation.
This long, Labor Day weekend marks a decade of Marvel Entertainment under Disney. That’s 10 years of Marvel co-president Kevin Feige working to create the grand spectacle we now call the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It’s 10 years of the movie industry watching, waiting, reflecting, and changing to try and compete with the House of Mouse’s biggest franchise to date.
People far smarter than I can talk to the effect of Marvel on the industry from an artistic standpoint. Professional critics and film journalists have spent, well, a decade watching everything unfold, using their stature and brilliance to try and boil a small cultural revolution down for us. I’m not going to try and pretend I have a tenth of their insight. I don’t. I highly encourage you to read pieces by those critics, journalists, and analysts.
A season comes to an end
Instead, I want to talk about what I think makes the MCU work when others, most notably the DC Extended Universe, have faltered. It has nothing to do with talent or vision — love or hate what director and producer Zack Snyder did with the Justice League, he’s a visionary in his own right — but rather a more simple and simultaneously complicated concept: time.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe under Disney went from being a series of stand-alone movies and became an extremely high budget television series. One that only worked because Feige and his team were given more than a decade to play in their sandbox.
“One of the things that’s interesting to me about the new mega-franchise storytelling is the way that it works in bits and pieces of other stories as fillips around the edges of the main tale,” critic Emily VanDerWerff wrote. “It reminds me of my beloved television, and Marvel is doing nothing if not making a huge, exciting TV show that we tune into every few months.”
Under Feige and Marvel Studios, superhero movies went from being a once-a-year showtime event to something more personal. It wasn’t just one actor playing the Hulk, Batman, or Superman for a couple of movies, spread out over a few years, with a new villain popping up to be defeated. The second wave of Marvel Studios movie, arguably the time that Marvel really came into its own, between The Avengers in 2012 and Captain America: Civil War in 2016, is what makes the MCU special.
These weren’t sequels so much as second or third seasons. Every movie referenced The Avengers, and cameos popped up where they shouldn’t. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki changing into Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers while walking down a hallway with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor’ in Thor: The Dark World. Captain America: Winter Soldier referencing Tony Stark designing new technology for SHIELD; Tony Stark dealing with PTSD and anxiety in Iron Man 3 because of the events in The Avengers.
No detail was too small, and all were made in earnest fun. Feige, who had worked on the early X-Men movies at 20th Century Fox, and who is a lifelong comic book fan, got it. He understood that what people wanted from superhero movies, a successful genre up to this point but rarely groundbreaking, was to embrace the corniness. Feige wanted to bring continuity Marvel comic book fans loved to an industry where the idea of having a 23-film franchise happen over 10 years wasn’t just unheard of, but met with major trepidation.
“Five years ago, looking at our plan, we knew that if Avengers was going to work, the movies had to stand alone,” Feige told Wired in 2013. “Now we have to prove to the studio that we’re more than just these five characters, these five franchises.”
We need to talk about Kevin
Feige knew from 2008 what he wanted to do; he called up Iron Man director Jon Favreau to ask about adding the Nick Fury post-credits scene. He wanted to set up a movie that wasn’t a direct sequel —something unheard of at the time. His ambitions were arguably visionary, but he ran into issues. He didn’t have access to the X-Men, Fantastic Four, or Marvel’s most famous superhero, Spider-Man. They were divvied up under Fox and Sony Pictures. Feige and his creative team at Marvel Studios were given another seemingly improbable task — take lesser known B- or C-characters and turn them into billion dollar hits.
By the time Avengers: Age of Ultron rolled around, Marvel Studios was looking to expand its roster. People were already all in. Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, and Thor found their audience. People were all in. They wanted more. Feige took a look at what they owned the theatrical rights to, and rolled the dice.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange proved that Feige and the team at Marvel Studios could make a long line of superheroes work. At the same time that Disney is gearing up to launch into its newest slate, taking the biggest leap into the unknown since the company’s initial purchase of Marvel in 2009.
Things changed behind the scenes. Feige started reporting to longtime Disney executive and close confidant of CEO Bob Iger, Alan Horn, instead of Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter. Feige reportedly butt heads with Perlmutter, according to Variety, and would often act as a filter for ideas that Marvel Comics wanted to push through, Wired added. Feige knew what he needed — and while Marvel Comics reportedly wanted more control, Disney was happy relinquishing it to Feige.
“Disney has allowed us to be a relatively small, tight-knit brain trust,” Feige told Wired in 2013. “These billion-dollar ventures come down to 10 people or fewer in a room saying, ‘You know what would be cool?’”
Part of that trust meant letting Feige run ship as captain, and trusting that he knew what he was doing — even when the major concept for Marvel’s season one finale was a giant purple monster trying to get his hands on six rainbow-colored stones for a gold gauntlet.
Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame worked — at least, financially. Critics might have been divided on Infinity War, but the movie brought in more than a billion dollars for Disney. Fans were left mostly happy. And then Endgame blew that out of the water, delivering an experience for most fans that satisfied the decade long path it took to get here. It also made Disney more than $2 billion.
People like to wonder what Feige was able to accomplish that other people haven’t. Zack Snyder had the heroes he needed to create a universe just as big and dominating as Marvel’s. I don’t have any answers (although I’m sure there are full time entertainment journalists who might), but I suspect what Feige needed, and was given, was time. Not all of Marvel Studios’ movies were critical darlings that Disney could boast about. Iron Man 2, although my favorite, is a joke amongst film circles.
But that didn’t stop Disney from pulling the plug on the entire operation. It didn’t set Feige back. They were allowed to continue making something in hopes that the crazy kid from Boston could pull off this trick.
Disney’s smartest move was doing nothing
It feels weird to think this in September of 2019 when Marvel Studios is one of the most successful film companies in the world and has helped Disney generate a record breaking $8 billion at the box office. But Marvel Studios almost feels like something that shouldn’t have happened. The market was ripe for this kind of storytelling (the early and mid-’00s saw an explosion of big, franchise heavy movies see success), nor were comic book movies an alien concept.
These aren’t just superhero movies. They’re not Oscar-winning productions, either. They’re something quite unto their own.
We’re heading into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s second season — otherwise known as its fourth phase. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Natasha Romanoff are gone. Bruce Banner is unlikely to return in a major role. Thor has one more movie. Hawkeye is getting his own show — kind of. And Peter Parker, who did eventually make it into the MCU, is now gone again. Marvel Studios and Disney are taking another giant leap into the unknown.
There’s a key difference between 2015 and now: Marvel Studios has a roster of characters that will continue into its second season that we care about, and they’ve proven that we can care about a bunch of people we might not know anything about right now. The Marvel Studios we know now started as this concept deep inside Feige’s brain: what if we could make a proper comic book movie by doing what comics do best and going bigger? What if we took this universe, and these characters, just as seriously as we do on paper?
What if we took the time to do this right?
The 10-year anniversary couldn’t have come at a more interesting time for superhero cinema. Warner Bros.’ Joker, the Joaquin Phoenix-starring movie from DC that has more in common with Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy and Taxi Driver than The Dark Knight or Justice League, is being hailed as the first comic book movie to possibly earn a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.
Ten years ago, Disney bought a studio. Then, from almost all accounts, everyone at Disney backed off. There are questions over monopolistic morals that come with Disney buying everything in its wake simply because it can. That’s an entire book, let alone another blog.
Looking back at this deal, just this single deal, the best thing Disney could have done once the purchase was finalized and Feige was in place, was exactly what they did: absolutely nothing at all. They just promised time. And time, in return, has been good back.
