MCU Authors On Crafting The Definitive Marvel Studios History And How The MCU Can Bounce Back [Exclusive Interview]

If you're a longtime /Film reader, you might think you know the history of Marvel Studios. After all, this site has been around since 2005, so in some ways, our archives double as a real-time history of the rise of this improbable pop culture juggernaut, which exploded onto the scene with 2008's "Iron Man" and became the dominant brand in Hollywood.

But even if you've been following along with us since the beginning, and even if you read Marvel Studios' own authorized history that was published in 2021, you won't get the full story until you read "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios." The book, which hits shelves on October 10, reveals behind-the-scenes stories you've never heard (one involves businessmen sprinting through the streets of New York City to make a last-second deal) and traces the arcs of notable figures like Kevin Feige, Ike Perlmutter, Avi Arad, Victoria Alonso, and Lou D'Esposito as Marvel Entertainment goes from a waning toymaker to one of the biggest entertainment forces on the planet. 

"As we were writing the book, I kept asking the question, 'Who is this book for?'" co-author Joanna Robinson told me during a July interview with her and co-authors Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards. "And everyone kept going, 'Well, it's for everyone.' That's ultimately where we tried to land, which is it's for enthusiastic fans, it's for skeptics, it's for people being like, 'How did these superheroes infest Hollywood?' Or it's for people wondering, when this book comes out in October, sitting there thinking, 'What happened to Marvel, this studio that I loved so much? What's going on?' We're hoping to answer that as well, which I think we did."

The result is an incredibly enjoyable read which puts in stark (hah!) context just how unlikely it was that this company set a template the rest of Hollywood would spend billions of dollars attempting to emulate. In my conversation with the authors, Robinson, Gonzales, and Edwards spoke about how they tackled such an immense subject, the biggest revelations they learned while writing the book, what Marvel Studios needs to do in order to get back on track, and more.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

I'm wondering for all of you, what were the biggest revelations that you learned when putting this book together? I know that you've been paying close attention to this stuff for a long time. I guess, were there any big revelations? Gavin, let's start with you.

Edwards: The thing that always fascinated me as I was working on the book was just the story of Marvel Studios in China. I had not realized that they, among other things, had perfect timing. That just as the Chinese market opened up to Western movies, that's as the MCU launches, and it was in the sweet spot of it was foreign and exotic, but not so unfamiliar that people couldn't understand it. And then they had this huge advantage over say, "Star Wars" comes in, the legacy movies are decades before, you haven't necessarily seen them in China, but you see the whole thing roll out.

And then learning what a huge part of the box office it was globally for Marvel, and then where they get to loggerheads and the extent to which Marvel really had to base itself in efforts to get back into China when China locked them out. So that was a story that I think I, like many people, had heard little pieces of, but then realizing when you put it all together, it tells the story of this growth that mirrors the overall story we're telling. That was fascinating for me.

Joanna, what about you?

Robinson: I think it comes down to a lot of, as you say, we knew a lot of the broader beats of this story, but it comes down to the hundreds of interviews that we did around this book and the little stories that we got that fleshed out those bigger story beats into understanding why things turned left and right the way they did on this path by the story of the very interesting personalities that were involved in every step along the way. I think one of the biggest "wow" stories for me was just how improbable it is that the first "Iron Man" came together at all/was a hit. All of the people we talked to on that movie described the incredible amount of chaos and just sort of indie movie, fly by night approach to this movie that, at the end of the day, stands as one of the most important and impressive blockbusters of all time, but when you dig into how it was made, it's a miracle.

Then also, a lot of the business stuff in the early days I wasn't as familiar with, and being able to talk to all the people who were there. Again, these are near impossible deals that were made in strange locations that involve running through the streets or lunch in Mar-a-Lago, or whatever the case may be. And all of that just seems, when you put it all together — and again, we think that coffee table book that Disney put out of their own story is a beautiful thing for fans to have. There's so much more to the story that they are either not interested in or not willing to tell that I feel like we capture in our book. And I think it adds more excitement and depth to a story that a lot of people might think they're very familiar with.

Yeah, the stuff about the businessmen running through the streets was just such a fantastic image to have in my head thinking about this stuff. Dave, did you have a revelation that you discovered?

Gonzales: I've been covering the MCU since its inception as geek press and on the Internet [as a] fan first, so I had a really rigid idea going into this project about what I thought it was going to be, and just how much I was focusing on the wrong thing. Everything that Joanna outlined was incredibly interesting and that's why it became the story. But as a geek journalist going into the first thing, I'm like, "Oh, I wonder if this rumor I heard was true. I wonder if this rumor I heard was true." What I found out is the way Marvel Creative works, they were all part of some sort of meeting at some point. Every sort of "leak" that we got had some sort of basis in reality. But that's actually the least interesting thing, because Marvel has such a rich history from comics and then a whole bunch of really smart movie people at the top of it that a small thing like, "Was Mephisto ever in 'WandaVision?'" actually was less interesting than how "WandaVision" went to become the debut on Disney+, and that entire story, as we're now seeing that industry collapse, and how Marvel jumped on it and had some early successes that led into I think just a glut of maybe too much product.

So I really went through my own personal journey with the studio and the media that it puts out. Because when it started, I was just happy to see some geek comic book properties brought to screen and being appreciated for what they were. And now, I'm even more in awe of how they could take what could be pieces that don't fit in the same puzzle and yet weave it into a gigantic tapestry.

So to peel back the curtain a little bit, when I requested an advanced copy of the book to prepare for this interview, the PR folks mentioned that you three were actually going to go back and add some stuff in because of the news about Victoria Alonso's exit. I suspect that must have been as shocking to you all as it was to the rest of Hollywood. What did you make of that announcement?

Robinson: Yeah, I was stunned. Genuinely stunned. We didn't change a ton in the book about Victoria in order ... because when we went back through and looked at the Victoria narrative, because we want to make sure that yes, Kevin Feige gets his due as the head of Marvel Studios, but there's a lot of people that he leans on that he's careful to cite that he leans on. So we wanted to make sure that Victoria Alonso and Lou D'Esposito, who were there from the beginning as producers at Marvel, got their credit. We have a whole producer's chapter about them. Victoria shows up again and again and again as we track the visual effects team and how they develop, et cetera. But we went back through and basically word-searched Victoria's name in the manuscript to sort of see how it all came together, we realized a lot of the writing, I suppose, was somewhat on the wall there.

There were just an adjective or two we had to change in order to make sure we were underlining and setting it up as something that didn't feel as much of a shock to our readers as it did to us. But that was a real reporting scramble for — I spent 48 hours calling everyone I could get my hands on, talking to Disney, talking to people in Victoria's camp, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that we got ... we didn't have a ton of time to track down the story, and I wanted to make sure we got the most correct, from all sides, story that we could.

Gavin and Dave also had to talk me down off the ledge because I am used to dot com reporting or even magazine reporting, which has a shorter timeline on it. And everyone would be like, "This is a book, Joanna, and it's okay if something's happened after we're done with the manuscript, between when we're done when the book comes out." I was like, "I need everything to be in here!" So Victoria, we did get in there. There's some other stuff that has happened. I was like, "Can news just stop happening? So that our Marvel book has as much information in it as possible."

Edwards: I mean, it wasn't that surprising — I think we didn't specifically expect Ike Perlmutter to leave, but he's been picking fights with Disney for a decade. So you can see that set up. And I think it's a tribute to Marvel keeping the walls up around that you really had to sort of go in deep to find out that there was sort of dissension in the kingdom until the moment when Victoria gets thrown out.

The Victoria Alonso situation not withstanding, since Marvel Studios is such an ever-changing entity, how did you know when you were finally done with the book? How did you decide, "Okay, this is where we should draw the line?"

Gonzales: They're like, "If you don't have it done in three weeks, we're not going to make our publishing date." [laughs] We were told that, and we had to realize we had to wrap it up there. But yeah, I think also, we were sort of, I mean, not blessed, but we got a lot of the big news out of the way in a year that they also pulled back the number of releases they were having so there's less of a chance that they were going to happen across something we weren't expecting.

Our book isn't so much about the plot of the MCU as the business of Marvel Studios, which helps. So we don't have to make a prediction as to who's a Skrull and then end up wrong six months later. But also, when we started this book, I said to Joanna, "Wouldn't it be fun if we could go 'Blade' to 'Blade'? Because I thought that would be a great bookend to it. But we ended up, just through the narrative and naturally telling, it going from "Ike Perlmutter tries to make movies" to "Ike Perlmutter gets frustrated and leaves." So I'm very happy that arc exists and we were able to, with very little changes, make that an additional arc that the book covers.

Robinson: But I think what's most fascinating about — as Dave said earlier, we started this when "Endgame" came out. So we started this with Marvel at the height of its powers. And in the subsequent years, due to a number of factors which we cover towards the tail end of the book — be it Covid, be it the launch of Disney+, be it trying to scale up their model — there have been a lot of stumbles in the MCU. I think the brand doesn't mean the same thing that it did to wider audiences. There's still a ton of, of course, ride or die fans. But I think that Marvel Studios logo in front of a project no longer means "certified gold" the way that it once did in audience's minds. So that was something we wanted to make sure we reflected.

We wanted to make this — as we were writing the book, I kept asking the question, "Who is this book for?" And everyone kept going, "Well, it's for everyone." That's ultimately where we tried to land, which is it's for enthusiastic fans, it's for skeptics, it's for people being like, "How did these superheroes infest Hollywood?" Or it's for people wondering, when this book comes out in October, sitting there thinking, "What happened to Marvel, this studio that I loved so much? What's going on?" We're hoping to answer that as well, which I think we did. Nothing I think encapsulates this more than the sort of late in the day change we had of the title of the book, from "The Rise of Marvel Studios" to "The Reign of Marvel Studios," because we wanted to make sure to capture this idea of, we're not saying it's over. Never count Marvel out. They've come back before. We're not even remotely saying that, but I don't think the trajectory is still up, up, up, up as it was when we started the book.

Edwards: Joanna came up with lots of great nouns to describe the current Marvel moment, of which my favorite was "the wobble."

Robinson: It's our version of The Blip. The wobble. Yeah.

Yeah, the iron grip seems to have loosened a little bit.