MARVEL Cinematic Universe

Ah, I didn't know that. Weird but also awesome, because to be shown in IMAX they have to be top notch or every flaw will be visible on screen.

 

It is a TV show, but the first two episodes are debuting on IMAX on the date I've listed.

 

Not quite. TCW was originally going to be four separate episodes until they decided "screw it, we'll make it a movie and put it in theaters". This is IMAX agreeing to screen and pick up the tab on a quarter of a television series before said series was officially announced.

 

But The Clone Wars was always going to be a show. Inhumans was intended to be a movie before they moved formats - and even then, they've added that the show does not necessarily replace the film project that they had planned.

 

Reasons.

This has a lot to do with internal stuff regarding disagreements between the heads of Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Studios. Best not to bore you with it here.

 

No. If you want a quick explanation, go here:

I guest starred in another one of their discussion videos on this very topic and how the Inhumans property fits into all of this; I'll fill you in when it arrives in a few days.

 

Actually, screw it. I've got nothing better to do, so I'll get into it right now. Since I actually plan on doing a Midnight's Edge script on this subject anyways, this could be a useful outline.

Marvel Entertainment and the dispersal of the Marvel film rights​

In 1992, Ronald Perelman of the Marvel Entertainment Group bought a large share of the company known as ToyBiz, thus causing the conglomerate to be absorbed into a larger group. In 1996, merely four years afterward, Marvel went bankrupt due to a comics crash and some poor business decisions at the time. For whatever reason, they didn't want to do what DC did with Warner Brothers and make a merger with a larger company at the time. (Ironically, if Disney had bought them at that point, then they likely could have avoided many of the issues - but at the same time, it might have been better for the MCU that they made this decision.) At this point, the heads of ToyBiz - Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter - sold the film rights to multiple companies to get enough capital to restructure the company and profit. And this plan would ultimately work as Perlmutter would be placed in charge of Marvel Entertainment as Arad would be placed in charge of Marvel Studios - though bear in mind that the Marvel Studios of this time period is not the same as the one we think of today.

Marvel had licensed their movies before, such as with Lucasfilm's biggest blunder (Howard The Duck) and Roger Corman's cheese-fest that never saw the light of day (The Fantastic Four), but what this plan entailed was unprecedented - at my count, Marvel sold nearly fifty of their licenses to nearly several different movie companies in the hopes that they would create movies or movie franchises. (Bear in mind that this was at the time that DC and WB had only put resources into Superman and Batman films and absolutely nothing else, so the sheer scale of their sales is truly audacious.) The selling of the rights would be more beneficial to Marvel in the short run than it would be to having successful movies, but movies that people paid to see would only help to expand their brand. So in order to encourage companies to commit to making their movies, Marvel included a clause that would allow them to retain their licenses indefinitely as long as movies and/or sequels were released every few years - and that, true believer, serves as the bane of many a Marvel fan's existence today. But more on that later - the short of it is that Marvel turned their company around and became successful again.

As one would expect, many of the film companies found out that they bit off more than they could chew. In spite of a handful of false starts with a few properties, most companies had little to show for what they'd purchased, and many of the rights reverted back to Marvel. Others, however, found a degree of success, such as New Line's Blade or Twentieth Century Fox's X-Men. Both did well, but neither were hits on the level of the Richard Donner Superman films or Tim Burton's Batman movies, leading some to presume that comic book movies were just a niche that weren't going to catch on. And then Sony's long-gestating Spider-Man movie, produced by Avi Arad, finally came out and destroyed that line of thinking when it broke box office records. Other studios then committed to developing other Marvel movies, and while none of them ever matched the success of Spider-Man, very few of them actually tanked. This is how Marvel Entertainment made headway into Hollywood, along with their Marvel Studios subdivision. (On an unrelated note, I feel like I read something in a newspaper that, at the height of this era, it was projected that an Avengers movie featuring the key players from these movies would cost upwards of $600M to produce and an ungodly amount of legal red tape to run through. This was years ago - before an Iron Man movie was even announced - and I don't know if I was reading The Dallas Morning News or some other publication, so I can't cite this.)

Marvel Studios forms and the MCU is planned​

Though the Marvel brand grew substantially due to the success of the new movies, but many of these movies deviated from the source material in significant enough ways that the movies didn't sit well with some of the creators - so a group of people at Marvel got the bright idea that they could make movies the way they wanted to. This is where that earlier licensing deal would bite them in the ass - once a license was purchased, Marvel would have to wait between seven and ten years for the rights to revert, and this time frame would be reset every time a new movie in a franchise were put into production.

Luckily, there were more properties were reverting to their control than there were staying at other companies. (A list of properties that remained out-of-reach for Marvel at the time includes Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Blade, Namor, Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and The Punisher, among others.) It was at this point that they made a partnership with Paramount to make movies out of the properties that they did own, thus beginning the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Shortly after committing to this plan, they realized that they had all the core players of the Avengers - Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor - and decided that the team-up would be what they would ultimately build up to.

To get started, Avi Arad would enlist Kevin Feige to serve as the primary producer. Feige was known for his work on several of Marvel's previous productions and was explicitly hired on multiple occasions to help make the films more accurate to the comics; he was also known for aggressively pursuing which would eventually lead to Arad and Feige having a falling-out and Feige gaining more power in Marvel Studios once Arad stepped down. Arad would later try his hand at making a mini-MCU with the Spider-Man property, but as we all know that didn't work out.

So as it stands, the Iron Man movies do great under Kevin Feige's supervision, and the others do well enough. This is where Marvel Studios as we know it today comes from. Aside from DC's failed attempt to start a DC movie universe with Green Lantern (and their later, actually successful attempt to do just that with Man Of Steel, which was in development before Marvel's Phase 1 concluded), nobody else tries to replicate the model that Marvel came up with until The Avengers, which becomes the biggest superhero hit of all time. Now, everyone wants their own shared universe, and Fox is among these groups once they try to restructure their X-Men film series, along with deciding to reboot the Fantastic Four property. And that's where the internal conflict at Marvel comes in.

The Feige/Perlmutter feud​

You see, Fox and Ike Perlmutter (the guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post) have never really gotten along. Like Kevin Feige, Perlmutter wants the rights back at Marvel, but unlike Feige (who has always been on relatively good terms with Fox), he's rather militant about it. He's been directly responsible for the marginalization of the Fox-licensed characters in the comics, the merchandise, and the adaptations through executive decisions, which has not sat well with a number of fans. (Sony has never run into the wrath of Perlmutter due to Sony being more cooperative as a company.) He's also been the one pushing for a great amount of emphasis on Inhumans content, which many are seeing as a cynical attempt to replace the X-Men.

Ike Perlmutter also has a reputation as a micromanager and has been a key factor in why several creators have taken issue with working for Marvel Studios. Unfortunately for Kevin Feige, he had to answer to Perlmutter for many creative and financial decisions, since Marvel Entertainment still oversaw Marvel Studios. Perlmutter's decisions include forcing the villain of Iron Man 3 to be a man because of toy sales, preventing the development of a Black Widow movie because he thinks that female-led superhero movies are inherently terrible, and only agreeing to do movies based on Black Panther and Captain Marvel if an Inhumans movie were wedged into Phase 3.

Ike Perlmutter came into conflict with Disney at large when the script for Captain America: Civil War would involve the presence of Iron Man - which he had previously agreed to allow, but now wanted to take Robert Downey Junior off of the project in order to save on budget. Given that RDJ has been instrumental in the continued success of the MCU, Disney wasn't going to have that, and thus they promoted Kevin Feige to a position where he'd no longer have to report to Perlmutter. (If you've wondered why there's a significant divide between Marvel TV and Marvel's movies, this has a lot to do with that.) Feige successfully maneuvering a deal with Sony - a deal many thought would be impossible under most circumstances - has basically done even more favors for him, as it ensures that he'll continue to have free reign. And that's how Marvel Studios split from Marvel Entertainment.

...This is actually a lot more than what I bring up in the conversation we have, but again, I'm going to need this stuff as an outline to follow later.

 

Spider-Man: Homecoming gets a trailer tease that features a flashback to Captain America: Civil War, along with a look ahead at another new element that hasn't been present in the previous five solo films:

 

And here's the full trailer.

Overall, I didn't get that same sense of euphoria that I got when I saw Spider-Man pop up in the second Captain America: Civil War trailer, but I feel like the movie still looks like a promising Spider-Man narrative in its own right.

An international variant ought to be dropping soon.

 

Now that is a trailer!