Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Marvel Cinematic Universe: Origins and Future

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

Long before Marvel was under the Disney umbrella, it was a conglomerate that wasn’t terribly interested in making movies. Mary Long caught up with Dave Gonzales, a co-author of MCU: the Reign of Marvel Studios to discuss: - Why making superhero movies wasn’t always an obvious decision.  - The success, and future problems, created by “Iron Man.” - How the pandemic changed Marvel. Company discussed: DIS Host: Mary Long Guest: Dave Gonzales Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Tim Sparks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. You don't have a comic book guy at the head of it. You have Kevin Feige, who's like, he would watch Star Trek 5 and then go home and think about what he would want Star Trek 6 to be to fix the Star Trek 5. So he wants you to have a good movie at the end of the day. All the armchair quarterback solution seems to be just make good movies.

And if there's one person that I feel like could just use that advice and be like, yeah, OK, I'll just make good movies. It's Kevin Feige. I'm Mary Long, and that's Dave Gonzalez. a podcaster, culture reporter, and a co-author of MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios. We caught up in person at our Denver podcast studio for a conversation about the origins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and what foreshadowed its current challenges, why superhero movies originally weren't an obvious play,

and the one thing that can't scale, even with an unlimited budget. So I want to talk about how Marvel lost its sheen, but I think maybe the best way to get there is to start at the beginning. Absolutely. And before we start at the beginning, let's talk about like the characters that are going to come into play. Because I found through reading your book,

there are these real people that are behind the Marvel movies and that drive it. Our understanding who they are and what makes them tick is like really essential to understanding what drives Marvel. So there's a ton of people

that you talk about in your book. But if you had to kind of hone in on three to five, who are like the big characters that are essential to understanding the story of Marvel? So I like to really start with Isaac Perlmutter, who I will be calling Ike from here on out. We don't know each other, but that's just how I like to refer to him. And Avi Arad, who I have had the chance to meet and hang out with on several occasions covering Marvel movies.

But in the early 90s, they were part of a company called Toy Biz that basically designed action figures. And Ike Perlmutter is really good at being a, you know, 1980s corporate raider. So he would buy up companies and product and sort of disassemble them and move them around. Toy Biz was the first company they felt like really sticking with. And I think that's because at some point they inherited the Batman action figure license around 1989's Batman. So they were able to see, you know, big toy money coming out of movies and thought that maybe these superhero toys could maybe do something. And so they were able to negotiate a pretty amazing deal to have a limitless license with Marvel in exchange for a portion of the company and some control, some board seats that they gave to Ron Perlman. So there's going to be a Perlmutter and a Perlman, but we'll all try to keep them separate.

And Perlman was somebody who had bought up Marvel Studios thinking that it was potentially like a mini Disney. He realized the purpose of all the different characters and how that could create different product. But he was always very product forward. And so after in like the 80s, Lucasfilm tried to do Howard the Duck. That's like the first big Marvel movie and it didn't do well. And so what Perlman sort of learned from that was there's much more cachet in making Marvel product, in having a movie in development, but not necessarily releasing a movie. So all of the late 80s, early 90s attempts at Marvel movies were like adaptations of the Incredible Hulk TV show or low budget Captain America's where he has like a motorcycle helmet on and there's a mask the whole time. And this really went up against somebody like Avi Arad, who was put in charge of developing toys for the X-Men series.

And Avi always liked the X-Men as characters because he says that he identifies with a mutant and he really is a weird dude. He's, you know, like a leather jacket wearing toy executive who just has a mind for what sort of like toy products we're going to hit big on the market. So once he realized that, you know, X-Men were going to be able to sell, he was like, we need to push this in some sort of product. And as, you know, the 80s taught toy developers, the best way to do that sometimes is a cartoon. So he partnered with Fox Kids to make the X-Men animated series that eventually grew to like the Spider-Man animated series and all of those things pushed toy products to an incredible degree. But Avi always wanted to push further into movies despite where the company was going. So he was always on 20th Century Fox to get the X-Men into theaters and they were able to put some X-Men animated series shows in primetime. is sort of like a market test and they did well. And that's where the deal began to create the

X-Men movies that we will eventually know about. And so once that proved to be profitable, Avi was allowed to create the first Marvel Studios, a kind of in-name only, but that studio's job was more packaging and licensing. So they would try to get an interested director together and then maybe try to sell a script or a project with a director or an actor to a studio and then let those movies develop, which would have been great. We would have gotten a lot more Marvel movies in the late 90s if the company itself under Perlman sort of didn't crash. He made some interesting business decisions. He used a lot of the profits from Marvel to buy up like Fleer, the baseball card company, right as there was a strike going on, which was a weird decision

that didn't pan out. He also bought, I believe, an Italian sticker company to sort of like disassemble for parts, but essentially used all these acquisitions to create junk bonds and a lot of that went through Marvel, sort of devaluing Marvel to the point that they had to declare bankruptcy. And then it became sort of a cage match between a bunch of different entities. And Ike Perlmutter was not about to give up his board seats on Toy Biz. That was like his baby. So eventually in 1998, they emerged from bankruptcy with Toy Biz sort of absorbing Marvel and becoming Marvel Entertainment, which would eventually lead to the movies. A lot of those early attempts at Marvel movies, that's not like the Marvel Studios that we know

today. It's this early iteration. So how do we go from that first Marvel Studios to then the Marvel Studios that we now associate with the MCU? I think they were really bolstered by the fact that they came out of bankruptcy to find that Blade, a movie that they had sold for maybe 25 grand, the rights to, actually was doing well. And I like to remind people always that Marvel movies really kicked off with a black vampire hunter played by Wesley Snipes. But then after that, a series of things happened. 20th Century Fox was finally free to do an X-Men movie and they found Bryan Singer and his way into it through producer Laura Schuller Donner, who at that point was working with assistant Kevin Feige because it all starts to weave together.

That's a name to remember. Yeah, it's a good name to remember. They found Bryan Singer who was like, I don't want to treat this like a comic book property. I want to tell my own story, using these characters in this world, and Marvel was on board. X-Men's one of their most popular properties. It's always been an IP they could use to talk about various inequalities, and Bryan Singer was going to develop that into a more human story. Sometimes that meant taking a step away from the comic's inspiration.

That's why you don't have Wolverine in his classic yellow, and they sort of make fun of some of the comic book origins of those heroes. But when the movie came out, because 20th Century Fox was kind of taking a risk, They moved the release date around a little bit, and that really frustrated Ike Perlmutter and Marvel Entertainment because it takes like nine months. It's basically like making a baby to make a product line. And so if you shift a release date and you don't have product ready or if it's a more mature movie than they were expecting, which it was, you maybe don't have the correct product lined up. So Ike Perlmutter would tell you they lost a lot of money on X-Men, even though it was a hit. And the next one was they had to untangle the Spider-Man rights, which is a whole different story that many people have written books and essays about.

But when it was eventually untangled and Spider-Man once again could become a movie and Sony had the rights to it, they made Spider-Man. And Spider-Man was a gigantic hit in 2002. And Ike Perlmutter's like, we get 20% of the box office. So even then, even for like Marvel's biggest hits in 2000 and 2002, they weren't seeing as much of a return as they wanted. And a lot of the returns they would get were still product based. So the big pivot happens in 2004 when a movie executive named David Maisel watches the Ben Affleck Daredevil. And he's like, surely they could do better than this from a story standpoint. Right. And so he researches sort of like the Marvel deal and how their licensing is going on.

And he gets through his contacts meeting with Ike Perlmutter and Mar-a-Lago. Trump definitely stopped by to say hi because Ike Perlmutter and Trump are really close. And David Maisel's pitch was you should form your own studio because then all the money comes back to you. You aren't just licensing out your characters, but you get to recoup more of the box office. You get to make more of the calls about creatively what's going on. You're not just lending your baby to somebody else and hoping it works out. And Ike Perlmutter, very interested in that idea because it means more money, but also a very shrewd businessman. So he's like, come back to me with a way to create my own studio without putting any money down.

And that's what starts like the David Maisel Marvel Studios era with like an amazing business deal that he works out with Merrill Lynch. I feel like today you hear that pitch and idea and you think, duh, why didn't anyone think of that earlier? And that was so that was not how things were done. Right. Not at all. And so it's just so essential to hit on the fact that that was a really novel concept, even though where we're sitting today, it's, of course, why hadn't anyone thought of that before? Right. And I mean, especially not from a comic book company. It was a really weird place for a movie studio to be coming out of. You didn't have any legacy movie people really at Marvel, except Avi Arad, who had been a producer on basically these licensing deals. So he would be a steward of the character and help people understand, quote unquote, the comic book character. But it wasn't like he was a producer who had a lot of experience fundraising or any sort of thing about the business of making film, which is where David Maisel stepped in and had to concoct this deal. where ultimately what happened is he ended up mortgaging a whole bunch of Marvel characters

like Captain America, like Black Panther, like Shang-Chi to Merrill Lynch, the movie rights to those characters in exchange for over $500 million. And the thought was that Marvel would produce four different movies ranging in budget from like $100 to $150 million and through the profits of those movies would pay back the loan. The thing that ended up being like the brilliant business thing and the reason I always credit David Maisel, because a lot of times people forget his name, is in order to set up this deal, he had to simultaneously convince the Marvel board that these properties were worth losing while turning around and convincing the banks that they were worth the money that he was asking for it.

So he had to ride both of those lines with very, very smart businessmen on both sides, but basically say like, you know, it's okay if we lose Captain America and there's a Merrill inch Captain America movie and then turn around and be like, no, like Captain America is our most valuable property. Like we're giving this to you because we're basically giving the whole company to you. So it's amazing that that got pulled off. And there were some times that David Maisel says they would, you know, try to switch the terms at the very end.

And he would just refuse to leave the conference room until like a deal was met. And it ended up working out. Not exactly one to one mortgage. He did have to pre-sell some rights to Iron Man in terms of foreign properties, but that's very widely done with movies anyway. So he didn't do much out of the box outside of this gigantic IP mortgaging that luckily ended up working out. Iron Man came out and they were able to pay back the loan at one at bat. And then that sort of led to the next steps to Disney, but also opened up Marvel Studios because while David was doing the business thing, he realized he needed somebody doing quality control. And that's where Kevin Feige came in.

He was a assistant for Lauren Schuller Donner, the producer on the X-Men movies. And basically, she was busy running her producing empire. And Kevin Feige was the person who was on set every day and would call back at the end of the day or at the end of the week and sort of give full reports. But because of that, he was also making himself an expert in the comics. Kevin Feige is a movie guy more than he's a comic book guy. So he's interested in making good movies and making good movies that make money. He taught himself everything he learned about the Marvel universe, starting with X-Men. So he read a whole bunch of X-Men comics. Bryan Singer was like, this isn't the story we're telling. He actually banned X-Men comics from the

set. But Kevin Feige would bring some Wolverine-centric issues and slide it under Hugh Jackman's door and that sort of thing. But sort of realizing that you could do both. You could make a good movie that is going to be profitable but also the answers to a lot of the sticky questions are actually in the comics and they did that arguably with iron man yeah and that movie again just feels like so iconic within not just because it's the first but also in what it's doing with this stigmatized superhero genre a little bit and how it's playing with that so what made iron man so appealing to marvel fans but also to kind of the layman that was less familiar with comics oh well i picked iron man specifically um as a more layman property

very specifically once again a toy property because that's how marvel really understood things at the beginning of the turn of the century um so they did a whole bunch of play tests with kids being like of these heroes which one would you like to see a movie with and they're like we want to see a movie with the flying robot that shoots lasers out of his hands And at the time, the Tony Stark character in the comics is probably most famous run was about him being an alcoholic. And then he's also, you know, an Avenger that bops in out of stories, but not necessarily the most family friendly four quadrant character to go with. And nobody really knew who he was. So that gave Jon Favreau sort of a blank slate once he came in to direct. Jon Favreau came in wanting to direct more of a comedy, sort of like a man out of place movie for Captain America that would have been lighter than the eventual Captain America First Avenger. Basically, Kevin Feige saw Elf and was like, this guy can do fish out of water.

And like, why wouldn't we want him to do Marvel? And then when it pivoted to Iron Man, Jon Favreau's sort of big point was everything has to be plausible in the real world. We're not going to do a rubbery superhero who's bending physics. It's like we have to set up why this happens and the plausibility of it. And that sort of connected with a post 9-11 America. And it's like, why don't we, you know, lift him out of his original Vietnam storyline and put him manufacturing weapons in the Middle East? And they were able to sort of put together this script that seemed really great. And then they hired Robert Downey Jr. And then they got to set and they kind of threw the script out every day. So Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges and to a certain extent, Gwyneth Paltrow, but she doesn't actually like to do that, would just sit in a trailer and talk about what scene they were doing, what it meant. And a lot of that led to the humor that was in Iron Man and the sort of Robert Downey Jr. flow where it feels improvisational, even though you can't really tell. And those sort of things became the hallmarks of a Marvel movie. So after that, an Incredible Hulk came out. They had a company retreat to sort of figure out how to do the next run of movies. And they went and they watched Iron Man. They're like, why does this work better than the Incredible Hulk? And it has more humor and it has humor that arrives organically through the characters. And so they decided this is what the template for a Marvel movie is going to be, is we're going to start with plausibility, let the characters run and bounce humor off of the incidents that happen actually in the movie.

And so you could sort of feel that Iron Man was like this proto Marvel Studios, basically Marvel Studios flying without a template. And because of that, a lot of people who work on that movie talk about it more as having an independent film vibe because Marvel Entertainment, the businessmen out east were not interfering at all. Marvel Studios out west was sort of trying to figure out how it was going to operate. And because it struck gold the first time out, they're like, how can we lock in this method to the best possible degree? And I think because of that, there's a lot of strengths from Marvel that come from that first production, but you also have a lot of the tensions that are now sort of breaking Marvel coming from that first production. Iron Man was in post-production at the beginning of another writer's strike back in the late 2000s, and they realized that their Act 3 wasn't working. It was Iron Man and Jeff Bridges in the Iron Monger suit sort of punching each other. someone said it felt really rock'em sock'em robots and like almost too plausible plausibility

so they went back john favreau went back to the writers uh and was like hey is there a way we can solve this and they were like hey we have two weeks where we have to do pencils down so they're like okay figure out a way to solve it in two weeks and the writers took like about a week to make a scene where uh tony stark takes obadiah stain up into the air because his suit doesn't have a defroster because he didn't build the tech he inherited the tech and they're like that's a story reason to get it done even better that is something that we could create entirely from ilm because they already had the sky plates from iron man's earlier flight and really all it took was sort of replacing characters and having robert downey jr and jeff bridges come in and do some

face stuff to like line everything up but they created a new third act for iron man mostly out of CG effects as the film was being edited together, and that created this idea sort of that the best idea should win at Marvel, which is great if you're doing one or two movies a year. It gets harder when you're doing three movies a year and three Disney Plus shows a year, and all of those things have to work through a visual effects pipeline. And so that's sort of the beginning of it would be great. It makes the best movie if you're allowed to change things up until the very end.

but that's not scalable, just like Kevin Feige as a person isn't scalable. You just found out that your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce into a meeting-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount plan, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you'll see exactly what's behind your quota risk

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That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot A-I slash F-O-O-L. Sign up for exclusive access today. Rippling.ai slash fool. To talk about Disney for a bit, it's sometimes wild for me to remember that that Disney acquisition first happened in 2009 because I or not first happened, happened in 2009. because today I think a lot of people are prone to float questions of like, oh, is Disney ruining Marvel? But you go back to a story like you just told

and that's what, 2015 when that's happening? And Marvel is thanking God for Bob Iger and like his emphasis on creatives and him stepping in and really giving Kevin Feige the reins there. It's wild to step in a multiverse version of that and imagine what would have happened if Bob Chapek had been CEO at that point.

Yeah, I mean, it would be really interesting to figure out just what would happen if bob chapek got to uh make more of his own decisions because the thing that sort of stymied marvel during that time period well actually and all the disney sub-brands um is chapek takes over uh a couple of weeks before covet hits so all of disney's big money-making properties which are its cruises which are its parks it's uh basically its experiences whether they be Hotel or Beauty and the Beast musical, all of those get shut down. And so what he's left with on the creative content side is this big push that actually Bob Iger put into place before he left, which is let's get subscribers on Disney+.

Iger was very bullish about creating Disney Plus off of some cool code that he inherited from ESPN and being able to sort of create this streaming empire. And at the time in 2018, 2019, it looked like the streaming wars were going to be the be all end all of entertainment. And so he was like, we're going to make sure that all of our flagship brands have a presence on Disney Plus. Pixar is going to be on Disney Plus. They had Kathleen Kennedy over at Lucasfilm announce a whole bunch of projects, a lot

of which we still haven't seen yet because i don't think a lot of them are ready to go and we see that with marvel too where they're kind of uh encouraged to at best forced to at worst announce a whole bunch of projects that they didn't know for sure if they were going to end up doing like are we ever going to see armor wars i still don't know so it was sort of off-footed it was a it was a weird plan to begin with but it was about flooding the streaming space with all these trustable brands and you would know what those things were going to be And I think it worked partially because the pandemic gave them a forced year off to it's much easier to do best idea wins if you have three months to figure out what the best idea is. And they were able to sort of work around what their streaming properties were going to be.

So when WandaVision kicks off in 2021, and then Loki follows it, and Captain America, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, spoilers, he becomes Captain America. All of those felt fresh, and they felt interesting, sort of like Lucasfilm was able to capperize on the Mandalorian. But keeping those things updated and, you know, this sort of idea that began with Iger and JPEG sort of pushed really hard, like the sun never sets on the Marvel Empire. You're going to have a Disney Plus show. You're going to have a movie. But then the pandemic hits and disrupts that entire plan. And so they have to start slotting things in wherever they can, which caused a lot of problems for the company. Not just Disney, but Marvel Studios and all of it, all of the Disney sub brands, I think, which is especially after the pandemic when they shortened the release window. So it was like maybe 60 days between when something came out in theaters and you'd be able to stream it on Disney Plus.

That really hurt Pixar. That really hurt Walt Disney Animation. And it maybe hurt Marvel. Marvel did a pretty good job of being like, no, all these things are connected. WandaVision is going to lead like right into Doctor Strange. So that would keep people watching things as soon as possible, basically for fear of being spoiled. But then once it became so much, once it became so many Disney Plus shows and so many movies and none of them had the Avengers title, which seems to be the flag that says you actually have to see it. It's sort of I think that fandom was like, OK, this is too much for me.

I will wait and catch up with it when I have time. And sometimes they just don't return to that product. And if you have fans saying that, then that really tells you that there's a problem. Right. I think part of the magic of Marvel and the intrigue of Marvel storytelling is that I, as someone who's admittedly not a super fan, could, especially in the early days, watch a movie. And without having any background on Iron Man or Captain America, I was intrigued and like I knew what was happening and could kind and appreciated little hints at interconnectedness between the movies. But now, again, as someone who's not a super fan, I'm not sitting down and watching all of these Disney plus TV shows that are coming out. So you you miss out. Yes, you kind of flood the market and you maybe play to this idea of you have to watch it now or else it will be spoiled. But you flood it too much and you kind of create this problem for yourself where you're building niches where previously you had everyone interested. Right. And yeah, it's hard to recapture after Endgame because Endgame was such a moment for everybody where they brought in a larger audience because it was like, here's a team up of all your heroes.

And Endgame worked pretty well together with Infinity War at providing arcs for those heroes within those two movies. So if you wanted to know more about Thor, oh boy, there was a whole bunch of movies you could watch. Now it sort of feels like, you know, people ask like, what movies do I have to watch to, you know, understand Black Panther, Wakanda forever? And it's like, there's different answers to that, man, because there's lots of characters that sort of intersect now. And some people feel, some people who are just casual Marvel fans, but would maybe be interested in being deeper Marvel fans, hit that homework barrier, which is the side effect to being so successful with making every movie a sequel. It's the, you know, once you're at the top of the pile in terms of that type of filmmaking, once you're the only studio that's made a cinematic universe that makes sense and sustains, what are the cracks that show in that? And the cracks are some people won't watch She-Hulk because they think they need to understand, you know, the Hulk or some people won't watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier because both of those characters are from, you know, other Captain America movies. And they've sort of tuned out at that point because Cap's gone. So the good thing is, as Kevin Feige said at the very beginning, when doing X-Men, the solutions are in the comics. In terms of doing serialized storytelling, Marvel has half a century worth of history about how to do these things that are essentially like product testing.

So I hope that they could find a way through it. But business-wise, sort of flooding the Disney Plus space and increasing output without finding a way to scale up Kevin Feige, the person, as the person capable of the alchemy, has sort of hurt them. But in a way that I see that also happening with Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy and Pixar and Pete Docter is those people all rose to the top of their positions in an environment that is now completely different in terms of what people are watching and whether or not they're going to the movie theater for it. Marvel's latest release, The Marvels, came out in early November and is considered a flop. In the opening weekend, it made $47 million. So I think all year you've had people kind of talking about, is this the end of the superhero era? Is this the end of the Marvel era? What do you think?

It's tough. So I definitely agree with the flop terminology, just as somebody who's followed box office for a long period of time. But it's also hard to tell when you put it up against other things people have caused to flop, when you make a graph with like Marvel earnings versus something like Blue Beetle, which is, you know, I thought also a fun film, but it has performed worse for Warner Brothers and DC. So it's hard to tell. I think you're always going to have a time where the shine came off the brand a little bit. The thing that's very encouraging to me is everybody's having a tough time at the box office. We're, I think, seeing a little bit more IP fatigue than we're seeing specifically superhero fatigue.

And something like the Marvels is really interesting because even though it didn't open as well as other Marvel movies, it's still, you know, one of, if not the highest opening from a black female director, because Nia DaCosta opened it. So they had a couple of things where it had to be the best in order to even be passing. Or something like Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania, which came out earlier this year, and everybody basically also considers it being a sort of lackluster and not critically received well, but it's also still in the top 10 box office grocers of this year. So, like, how bad did it do, really? It's interesting to see with all of Disney right now that if I were going to trust somebody to dig themselves out of their own hole, it would be Marvel Studios. They've pushed a lot of their releases from 2024 to 2025, with the exception of Deadpool 3, which won't be the title, but we'll call it Deadpool 3. And that's also going to be the first R-rated MCU film that's wide released. So there's one big risk next year, but they're excited about it and they hope that people will get excited about it to the point that when Marvel gets back to doing three movies a year, there's a bit more appetite for it.

And that's also going to allow them to sort of re-pivot and hopefully focus a little bit more on the quality of the stories. Plus the WGA strike, the winnings that they were able to pull off there requires there be a showrunner and an on-set writer for their Disney Plus series, which is why they rebooted Daredevil, the streaming series, even though they'd shot either a quarter to a half of it, depending on who you talk to. And they shot a little bit of a series called Wonder Man that they're sort of going to retool slightly. But what they learned sort of trying to produce television during the Marvel Studios method is that doesn't really work. You can't let Robert Downey Jr. make your TV series moment to moment. TV doesn't really work that way. So now they're going to need to have a showrunner with the show Bible and then an on-set writer to help people sort of navigate everything, which is much more instead of being a disruptor in the TV space like they were trying to be with things like WandaVision and Loki season one. And now they're going to have to sort of play by the TV rules, which I think is great.

Like there's a reason television works so consistently across the 20th century. It's because we built these rules in order to have like fun, serialized storytelling. So I'm hoping both those things could recenter. It's a lot harder if I'm looking at like Disney sub brands to think about, you know, like how the parks rebound or how Disney animation rebounds from Wish or how Pixar rebounds from people. just waiting to see it on Disney Plus and therefore not seeing it in the theaters. I was very happy that Elemental had the legs this year to overcome a flopping opening weekend and sort of go back into profitability. But it's very hard to see how Disney moves forward with a whole bunch of its flagship

brands basically not performing the way that they need them to. But you make a good point. I don't know that I would bet against Marvel and Kevin Feige either. At the end of the day, we're still talking about a hugely successful franchise. that across 33 films has grossed over $30 billion. It's easy to pile on and say, oh, they're meeting their demise. I don't know. We could sit tight and wait and see.

It's like sometimes it's hard to be top dog. And as somebody who's been following it since the beginning, I heard a lot of stuff after Avengers Age of Ultron that I'm hearing now, which not necessarily the box office was great for that, but people were being like, it's too complex. It doesn't have an ending. Marvel Studios is over. And I'm like, they can absolutely repivot. Because again, you don't have a comic book guy at the head of it. You have Kevin Feige, who's like, he would watch Star Trek five and then go home and think about what he would want Star Trek six to be to fix the Star Trek five. So he wants you to have a good movie at the end of the day. And everybody's, you know, solution seems to all the armchair quarterback solution seems to be just make good movies.

And if there's one person that I feel I could just use that advice and be like, yeah, okay, I'll just make good movies. It's Kevin Feige. So I have high hopes for the rebound in terms of the creative forces there. As long as he sticks around, there's two things that would spell the death of the Marvel brand in my mind right now. One is the sudden departure of Kevin Feige, because there's a lot of very talented people who form what they call the Marvel Parliament, which is sort of like the second layer of producers that are able to shepherd projects through. But none of them have, I think, the track record to do what Kevin Feige has been doing. And also, a lot of them are so hyper-focused on their movies, as they should be, that it would be interesting to see what happens if you elevated them to the decision-making level that Kevin Feige needs to be at. or if they release an Avengers movie and that bombs because that's their core brand. That's the brand you have to show up for. That's what we all learned in 2012 is you show up for an Avengers movie and those are the culmination movies.

So whether or not you've been watching what came before or what came after, an Avengers movie sort of has to live and die by its own runtime. And so an Avengers movie comes out and bombs, then their options on how to move forward become increasingly limited and it's going to be difficult to regain the dominance that they had. Regardless of what happens with Marvel moving forward,

you know, you have Warner Brothers DC. They've tried to build like their own superhero extended universe with like varying degrees of success, right? You have, okay, this summer when Barbie's coming out and people are talking about the Mattel cinematic universe,

whether it's Mattel or something unseen or it's Warner Brothers in DC, do you have your eyes on another company, be it a studio or an IP empire that you think could replicate, genuinely replicate the success that Marvel's seen? I don't know. That's tough. I would say with the pause that we've had in Star Wars, it's hard to count Star Wars out. But I'm trying to think about things outside of Disney. I think what Sony's attempting to do with its Spider-Man universe is interesting. We're going to get

a couple of non-Spider-Man character movies this next upcoming year. We're going to get Kraven and we're going to get Madam Web and then Venom 3. And that sort of idea that that could be building to something that Sony's always been trying to do a Sinister Six movie since 2010. So the idea that they could sort of band those together. But it's tough because the thing that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not only good film production and good business sense, But it hit at the exact right time. We have a chapter in our book that is sort of the Iron Man three chapter. But what it really is, is the China's movie going population explodes. They go from like, you know, a couple hundred million a year to like billions a year in terms of the box office that comes out of China. And China at that point was very open, not very open. They were just beginning to let American productions into China at a more regular pace, whereas previously they'd sort of been like you would have a delay from the worldwide release and you could only release in certain months because they had reserved certain months to be for Chinese local cinema only. And then once these Marvel movies sort of come in and they're big and they're flashy and they're, you know, with the exception of Iron Man making missiles sort of fluff, they managed to really capitalize on that in a way that we've now seen China sort of ramped down.

Chinese national cinema has been improving and their box office in China has been improving. And so they don't have the need necessarily to import a blockbuster anymore, which has made them and then several other countries get a little more specific about what they want to see in Marvel movies. So a lot of times movies won't open in the Middle East because it features a same sex relationship or something like that. And that's going to ultimately hurt a fraction of the international box office. But there was a time period in between like 2012 and 2016 where China was the international box office was exceeding the domestic box office by such a degree because China was basically letting the movies come in and they were gigantic hits there. Now that the film landscape has changed, both because of that and because of post-pandemic theatrical habits, if I knew how to replicate it, I would. And I would be an executive somewhere because I think there is a certain amount of right time, right place, right idea that allowed the MCU to do what it did. And also because of that, I don't think even the MCU knows how to replicate that. Yeah. Dave Gonzalez, thanks so much for your time.

It's been awesome talking with you. Your book, which you wrote with two other authors, Joanna Robinson and Gavin Edwards, is called MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios. It is a fantastic book, regardless of whether you are a Marvel super fan or not. It talks about how things get made in Hollywood and is a great kind of entertainment history

of the past couple decades. So thanks so much. Great to have you on. Thank you. It was great talking to you. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, And The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against,

so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.