It started with Iron Man and has not stopped since. What next for the MCU?

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

But that is kind of what 2008’s Iron Man was, with its US$140 million production budget and loose, improvisational style, years before the franchise became a multidimensional web of interconnected plot lines and corporate synergy fuelling the Walt Disney Co.

In a new book, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards chronicle how a floundering comic-book publisher grew into a money-printing movie-making machine.

The book traces the film juggernaut’s origins from Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s, leading up to a pivotal meeting at future US president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

There, executive David Maisel pitched Marvel Entertainment’s chief Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter on the idea to build a true studio.

Disney chief executive Bob Iger eventually sidelined Perlmutter in favour of Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, in a company reorganisation in 2015.

From relatively humble beginnings, the firm elevated its B-list heroes – it did not own the film rights to Spider-Man or the X-Men – and became Hollywood’s dominant hitmaker.

Marvel Studios’ fan-boy president on new Hong Kong Disneyland ride

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 instalments, the box office suffered.

Certain analysts – not just wishful-thinking movie critics – are now taking the old “superhero fatigue” chestnut seriously.

Robinson does not dwell on those challenges, but she and her co-authors do not totally breeze past them either. Here is what she learned about the studio and the state of Earth’s mightiest entertainment brand.

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

Robinson: To give him some benefit of 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 sure-fire winner for the toy business is to put youngish, good-looking white men at the front of your stories.

That’s what he thinks “moves plastic”.

There is a point in the book where Chris Hemsworth, after playing Thor in a few films, is feeling like he is 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 instalment 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 favourite 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.

Every Marvel Cinematic Universe film ranked, from worst to best

With the rapid pace of the films and the Disney+ shows, we have 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 films 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.

It is interesting to go back to the first Iron Man, because, as you write, Jon Favreau and his team did not 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 is about to be on trial for misdemeanour 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.

Park Seo-joon to Steven Yeun, all the Asian stars in MCU films and shows

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 favourite 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.