The extreme production schedule for the Marvel Cinematic Universe
It’s no secret that the Marvel comic book movies have a set public schedule for when their movies are released. Currently, they have planned out all of the movies up late 2020. From the release dates of “Black Panther” on Feb. 16, 2018, to an untitled film on Nov. 6, 2020, there are potentially more than nine movies slated for release by Marvel.
That isn’t including the conflicting reports on a Venom movie and the Netflix exclusive television series like, “Jessica Jones.” Regardless, it is an intense production schedule, even if they have different directors and teams running each individual movie, that is a lot of material to manage. The MCU has become extremely successful and profitable after all of this planning, and it looks like their management system has been around since the first film of the MCU, “Iron Man.”
How do they continue to keep such a tight schedule and maintain a high-quality production? The first and maybe most important part of this is money. With Marvel now being owned by Disney and with the MCU being previously successful, it’s safe to say that they might as well have infinite money to throw at their situation. Marvel’s least successful film was “The Incredible Hulk,” grossing about $263 million while its budget was $150 million. While that isn’t great, especially since many of their films have grossed over a billion dollars, even their worst is still turning a profit.
Another reason they can keep this schedule up is the strict management they have on the projects. Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios, talked about how everything is done in-house, and that they keep a tight lid on marketing, what is released to the public before release and can sometimes be pretty secretive about what character roles are. In an interview with Drew Mcweeny of Uproxx, about how the studio kept Black Widow’s role a secret in “Iron Man 2” Feige said, “Yeah, that was tricky… Since she’s got a big SHIELD logo right on her arm, we had to Photoshop that out of all the early materials we sent out.” This is indicative of a high level of control on the executive side of things when it comes to production. That kind of control is meant to make sure the film looks the same as the others, and the crews stay on task and are meeting all of their deadlines. There is not a lot of room for error in these scenarios because if they have to push the release back, they run the risk of interfering with their other films’ potential earnings.
Because of this strict control of crews and the money that is being put towards this endeavor, Marvel has been able to release 17 films in just nine years, or if we include upcoming releases, that will be 20 films in ten years. That is unheard of in the film industry. No one has been able to produce this many high-budget films this consistently and bring in over $13.5 billion dollars in box office sales.
