Eighteen years later, we’re used to the idea that the MCU is a juggernaut. Yes, there have been stumbles along the way; Phase Two had some weaker films, while the Multiverse Saga hasn’t exactly landed as planned. But the MCU is still a force to be reckoned with, as Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s box office reminds us. Marvel recently unveiled the MCU’s X-Men cast, setting up a Mutant Saga that’s sure to be a success. Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey has the potential to be the new Iron Man, centerpiece of this reborn universe.
Eighteen years ago, the MCU was just an experiment. Marvel had tried for decades to get studios to take their characters seriously, but nobody was interested. Back in 1998, when Marvel sold the film rights for Spider-Man, Marvel offered Sony the rights to every other Marvel character (bar the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk, who were already at other studios) for just $25 million. Incredibly, Sony said no, showing just how worthless they considered the other superheroes to be. And so Marvel was left in an unenviable position.
Marvel didn’t start out as a conventional film studio. Lacking experience and infrastructure, Marvel instead licensed characters out: Fox got the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and the X-Men, Sony got Spider-Man and his associated characters, while New Line finally managed to get Blade off the ground. But Marvel boss Ike Perlmutter grew increasingly frustrated, because films took time to make, and release dates kept changing – making it very hard to synergize, and cutting into Marvel’s own profits. After years working with other studios, Marvel set up a studio of its own.
There was a problem, though. In Iron Man, there’s one memorable scene where Jeff Bridge’s Obadiah Stane berates his scientists because they can’t reproduce the Iron Man armor: “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps,” he fumed. As ridiculous as it may seem to modern viewers, the MCU was basically born out of the same experience. The rights to Marvel’s biggest names had already been scooped up by other studios, meaning Marvel just had the characters nobody cared about. In his book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean Howe recalls Hollywood execs mocking Captain America as a man with a giant Frisbee.
Over in the comics, the Avengers had finally become the centerpiece of the Marvel Universe thanks to a relaunch under Brian Bendis. Hoping to do something similar, Marvel gambled on arranging financing to make a run of movies; in 2005, the new studio announced plans for Captain America, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Shang-Chi, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, and the Avengers. “We spent a lot of time putting together books of potential characters,” Kevin Feige recalled when speaking to Tara Bennett for The Story of Marvel Studios. “We had sub-lists with Phantom Eagle and Clandestine.”
Some of those names remain deep cuts even now, giving a sense of just how difficult things were for Marvel back in 2005. Even the rights for Iron Man were elsewhere, but thankfully those returned to Marvel later that year. And then, in an amusing twist, the newly-established studio decided Tony Stark was the best piece of scrap in the cave. This wasn’t because of some overarching vision, or anything like that. No, the decision was made based on predicted toy sales. As Ben Fritz explains in The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies:
“To decide which film to make first, Marvel convened focus groups. But they weren’t convened in order to ask a random cross-section of people which story lines and characters they would most like to see onscreen. Instead, Marvel brought together groups of children, showed them pictures of superheroes, and described their abilities and weapons. Then they asked the kids which ones they would most like to play with as a toy. The overwhelming answer, to the surprise of many at Marvel, was Iron Man… ‘That’s what brought Iron Man to the front of the line,’ said a person who helped to decide which movie Marvel would self-produce first.”
Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk became the first official MCU movies (the Hulk, largely because Universal was willing to distribute the film). Have you ever noticed how different those two films are in tone and style? That’s because Marvel didn’t really know what would work. The MCU’s general approach solidified after the success of Iron Man, which set a pattern of self-aware whimsy, establishing a science-based superhero universe that would only gradually embrace the supernatural. Perhaps there’s another world where The Incredible Hulk performed better, and set a very different pattern.
The first Avengers were Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. Few of these heroes were household names before the MCU, and next to none of them were taken seriously. But Marvel built the MCU without the biggest brands; Spider-Man and the X-Men were unavailable, with both Sony and Fox committed to continuing their own franchises. Nobody knew whether the idea would work, but box office takings were promising enough to suggest it had potential. In 2009, Disney bought Marvel, anticipating future success and keen to distribute MCU movies.
In his autobiography, The Ride of a Lifetime, Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted this was something of a gamble. “Marvel was already contractually bound to other studios,” he noted. “They had a distribution agreement with Paramount for multiple upcoming films. They’d sold the Spider-Man rights to Columbia Pictures (which eventually became Sony). The Incredible Hulk was controlled by Universal. X-Men and The Fantastic Four belonged to Fox. So even if we could acquire everything that wasn’t tied up by other studios, it wasn’t as pure an IP acquisition as we would ideally have liked.” But the sale proceeded, nonetheless.
The MCU was born of gambles, necessitated because the studio was basically playing a Tony Stark: building a shared universe out of scraps. But The Avengers broke $1.5 billion in the global box office, proving the gamble had paid off. The MCU turned second-tier characters into household names, before Marvel eventually struck a deal with Sony that brought a new Spider-Man into this shared universe. And then, at last, Disney bought Fox – a stunning decision that has made the Mutant Saga possible.
Most viewers are expecting next year’s Secret Wars to end with a multiversal reboot. If that’s the case, then this will be a very different MCU – one with the X-Men front and center, an established relationship between Sony and Marvel that has brought us the success of Brand New Day possible, and so much more. Pretty much everything is on the table now, including both the biggest brands and the heroes Marvel has managed to turn into superstars. Little wonder Marvel seem eager to move on to that next phase, and stop working with the scraps.
