Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Where Marvel Goes Next

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

After last weekend, Marvel movies have grossed over $30 billion worldwide. Where does the franchise go from here? Dave Gonzales is a co-author of “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and a return guest to Motley Fool Money. He joins Ricky Mulvey for a conversation on what the latest Deadpool movie means for the state of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. They also discuss: Ike Perlmutter’s attempt to oust Bob Iger Bubbles in comics, movies, and franchises Takeaways from Deadpool’s $400+ million opening weekend Heads up: at (18:05), spoilers for Deadpool abound! If you haven’t watched yet and want to, save this part of the show for once you’re back from the theater.  Companies mentioned: DIS Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Dave Gonzales Producer: Mary Long 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. Because Disney is an IP company, because at some point when Bob Iger was the CEO, he was like, creating is so much more difficult than buying and infusing that into your brand. They need to figure out a way to tell better stories. They need to reorient to the story place. And I think that's something that they're slowly working their way back to,

because before they were just like, what's the spectacle? Oh, you want to see how many Avengers can we put in one movie? you'll show up for that. And now that people won't show up for that, hopefully they go back to the story. Because I think if you're chasing a spectacle movie, you're making a theme park ride. And like, that's not how drama should work. I'm Mary Long, and that's Dave Gonzalez. He quite literally wrote the book on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My colleague, Ricky Mulvey, caught up with Gonzalez live in Denver to debrief on what the latest Deadpool movie means for Marvel's past and for its future.

They also discuss Ike Perlmutter's exit from Disney, the state of visual effects houses, and what boom-bust cycles look like in comics and in movies. We'll get to the business stuff in a second, but first off, it's a big superhero movie this summer. Yeah. What's your, what's your, we'll do a, we'll talk spoilers later. we're gonna go deep maybe hopefully but what's your spoiler free review of Deadpool and Wolverine are we out of the post-endgame darkness here oh I definitely think so I'm I think that the post-endgame darkness was a little exaggerated but I do think that we've rebounded from uh

Secret Invasion and uh the Marvels which I think is going to be seen at least if everything keeps going okay is going to be seen as like the low point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe just because Secret of Asia wasn't very good and the Marvels didn't make that much money. This is a movie that sort of rewards viewers who have done their homework, but also unabashedly makes fun of them. Yes.

And I wonder if that's going to change within the Marvel Universe anytime soon as they try to draw in new viewers. But also, this movie just made more than $400 million in a weekend, so maybe it's not worth concern trolling. And we've crossed the $30 billion for Marvel in general in profits, So everything's going according to plan here with Deadpool and Wolverine.

But yeah, I think this is something that's very specifically Deadpool was tailor made to do. And I was thrilled to see what they were going to do with Deadpool when 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney. And this is kind of a best case scenario. I enjoyed the previous Deadpool movies for how irreverent they were and for how much they were able to make fun of the canon. And then when Marvel Studios tried to do their own fourth wall breaking character with She-Hulk, they did it in a way that I thought was really funny, but it wasn't irreverent.

It was very reverent. It was Kevin Feige, the computer, you know, X-Men's on its way. The most we could let you do is assume that Jennifer Walters had sex with Matt Murdock. But Deadpool goes far beyond that. It gets its R rating for language within, I think, the first 90 seconds. I timed it the second time I saw it. and that's the second F-bomb, that'll do it to you. And then just in case that wasn't enough,

the title sequence is incredibly violent. And so does it want you to do your homework? Yes. Is it also just a ride? It's a road trip movie with action sequences every like 15 minutes. I think that works if you're just in it for the ride and the jokes

and it's a hot summer out there and you need to get into the theaters. I'd say go for it. I think it's more rewarding the more you invest in it, but that doesn't mean it's not a good time at the movies for people over 18. Yeah, I think it... And I want to check in on the MCU.

Yeah. But I think it works best as a comedy and it's worst when it's a dog show. Uh-huh. But let's talk about the MCU because we also had Comic-Con this past weekend. Yeah, yeah. Some pretty significant announcements,

which can be, I would say, signs of optimism or almost signs of cynicism about this business, depending on your vibe. But Robert Downey Jr. is back in the Marvel Universe after dying in Endgame.

He is Dr. Doom. We're getting a big Avengers movie again from the Russo brothers. We're getting two of them. And Deadpool just had the biggest R-rated opening. Fantastic Four is also back. So you wrote the book on the MCU. You co-wrote the book on the MCU. What is the state of it now?

They are, quote unquote, we're so back. There's a funny tweet I saw. It was one of those baseball hats that has a Velcro patch on the front and just two patches. It says MCU so over, MCU so back. And you can just kind of switch out the patches. So we're back. But the weird thing about that Comic-Con panel is watching it unfold and sort of not knowing anything super new about Marvel since earlier this year. So just trying to figure out, you know, back the last time I talked to my sources to add some new stuff to the paperback, which coming out this fall for MC Rain and Marvel Studios, Jonathan Majors, the verdict still hadn't come in yet.

So they had all these plans, but nobody had said go on what was going to happen. The interesting thing about their Comic-Con presentation is they showed three movies. All three of those movies are pretty weird for what Marvel does. They're going to make a President Hulk with Harrison Ford, and that's incredibly weird. Apparently, the footage showed him making a speech in front of the White House and turning into the Hulk, which is pretty amazing. They have Thunderbolt's Asterisk, which I'm convinced is called something like Dark Avengers or something. But that's Marvel's Suicide Squad, so that's a little off-center for them. And then they showed off Fantastic Four, which is going to take place in the alternate 1960s New York and is basically looks like Disney's Tomorrowland, but pasted over the whole city of Manhattan.

And then ends with a huge Galactus tease and not Galactus, the storm cloud, like in the previous 20th Century Fox Fantastic Four, but the full giant human Galactus peering into a window. And then they had the Fantastic Car fly over the audience. And so I'm like, these are three things that are super weird. they're not multiversal directly on their surface so they are sort of like hearing this and then all of a sudden they're like well wait wait a second if you're excited about this you're gonna love all the old hits because we broke the break glass in case of emergency apparently last december here's robert downey jr here's the rousseau brothers uh avengers 5 kang dynasty what what was that no it's doomsday it's always been doomsday don't worry about it so all those

things sort of they felt like fear flops wet to me and so the last like 10 minutes of the panel i was like what i was ready to call it a fantastic year for marvel the flying car year in hall h like great time but then they did the robert downey jr stuff and it's going to overshadow and it feels so weird because the comic-con audience is the audience they've seen all the marvel movies they've read the comics where you know tony stark and or doom you know switch places those are the people that you have to explain it to this you feel like an announcement for the back of the house for the people who you know for you know i'm 40 but my mom even will be like oh robert downey jr's in an avengers again let's go out and see it i'm like you don't need to do that my man

like the mcu's still going pretty strong and we also other people can play dr doom yeah it's a big character oh i i think we will definitely see other people play dr doom we were talking about this before we started recording but there was one of the bosses of the marvel cinematic universe was a guy named Ike Perlmutter. You know Kevin Feige is the creative controller of it, but Ike Perlmutter, who sort of brought Marvel back out of bankruptcy through sort of what would be the comic books in the 90s and the 2000s. Yeah.

And now he's gone. Yeah. And he was aligned with Nelson Peltz. He wanted Bob Iger sort of out of his role. He didn't get what he wanted, and now Perlmutter is gone. This might seem like a small thing to an outside observer, but what does it mean for the MCU now that Ike Perlmutter is out of the picture? I mean, it means that Kevin Feige is now king of Marvel and nobody can challenge him even if they wanted to.

So my understanding of how the situation works, and we cover some of this in this book, but then obviously some of it's been new, is Perlmutter was told sort of that Disney wasn't going to mess with Marvel when the original sale went down. He and Iger had dinner with their wives at a steakhouse, and they talked about how this was going to be like acquiring Pixar from Steve Jobs or, you know, like, let's Pixar be Pixar. They're going to like let Marvel be Marvel. And then after a couple of years of that, somebody snitched to Bob Iger that Isaac Perlmutter and Marvel Entertainment weren't letting things like Captain Marvel or Black Panther happen very specifically around the thought of Avengers Civil War, or I'm sorry,

Captain America Civil War. They were like, who wants to see heroes fight each other? And the Rousseau brothers were like, everybody, everybody wants to see this. And so someone at Marvel Studios, when the Rousseau brothers realized that they were going to try to note Civil War out of existence, were like, it's going to be either the Rousseau brothers or the studio has to let up on these notes. So someone told Iger, who then basically told Perlmutter to step out of the way and pushed him back and gave Kevin Feige control over Marvel Studios, Marvel Television, Marvel Comics even, so that Perlmutter had interest in it and was still one of the biggest Disney

shareholders because of the deal to sell Marvel. But he was losing control over Marvel, actually. And so Isaac Perlmutter is a very weird man, and I do not want to piss him off because he's got a very interesting past, but is very profit focused. So when Disney's pandemic hits sort of started rolling over and everybody was mad at Bob Chapek, who was CEO, and Bob Iger had to come back, Isaac Perlmutter saw it as like, not only am I losing money, but they brought back the dude who lied to my face and then kicked me out of my job. And so we started this activist board member push to try to get Iger out. And he lost. And then he sold all his shares and kind of took his ball and went home. So I don't know what Ike Perlmutter is going to do in the future.

Maybe he'll go back to what he's really good at, which is buying companies that are failing and dismantling them for parts and just being rich. But he's not part of the Marvel in any sort of way. And they're not part of Disney either anymore. So Kevin Feige and maybe Jon Favreau as well have a little bit more room to move with the characters in the movies. Yes, they can do whatever they want. Perlmutter was always worried about the bottom line. And because of that, he was worried about merchandising.

He was worried about action figures. So that's the sort of thing behind not wanting Black Panther or not wanting women to be superheroes is because with the first line of toys that he did with Avi Arad for X-Men, like Storm was the lowest selling. And so like in his mind, he's like, oh, boys don't buy black or female superhero characters. So why make toys about it? So why make movies about it? And that's sort of what his view of it all was. And it was sort of Avi Arad and Kevin Feige who sort of rescued those characters and were like, actually, you want them in movies. Yeah.

And that's where we got where we are now. And worth mentioning, Black Panther did tremendously well. Incredibly well. Yeah. He was straight up wrong. Yeah. Um, the other thing at the end of your book, you talk about how the visual effects houses are just so stretched and it's, it sounds like it's a really tough working condition.

And Marvel also got to this place where they were just demanding anything and everything right where there were no creative limits on the effects they could do, which I think ultimately hurts them. Like creativity works best when you have some amount of limits. How are the VFX houses now? It seems like they're getting a break and it seems like this is a very important relationship for this business. Yeah, they're getting more time and they are talking about either joining Yahtzee or forming some sort of VFX union, which ultimately is going to be have to have to be the thing that changes it for VFX artists in general.

I've seen a lot less scapegoating of Victoria Alonso, who was fired, but I don't think was causing the toxic environment that has somewhat been reported with the Marvel visual effects houses. everyone that i have talked to both before and after she was dismissed is like she was the advocate between the studio and the vfx houses of course if you're an artist who's sleeping under his desk to get a shot done the person whose face is on the wall you're throwing darts at is probably victoria alonso but that doesn't mean she's there like yelling at you or doing things so the industry needs to change overall uh the good thing that marvel did is they pushed everything besides Deadpool and Wolverine off of this year so the VFX artists can catch up,

especially with something with Captain America Brave New World, which not only had a whole bunch of resuits, but as I mentioned, has a Hulk, so it's going to have a lot of visual effects. Those all got pushed back. They're using many more visual effects houses per project than they used to.

And my hope is that they're being a little bit more lenient with the bidding. But in terms of like, is it going to be better? If you talk to the actual VFX workers, no, but it's not just Marvel, it's the industry. And that needs to be fixed as soon as we can. Yeah. Going to where we are in the cycle, one of the things that's interesting to me is I think there's a book that's sort of a precursor to yours, which is Marvel Comics, The Untold Story by Sean Howe. Sean Howe, yeah.

And the thing that's interesting about it is it tracks these boom and bust cycles for comic books. And your book, which takes place over a shorter period of time, is really about the boom and then we moved to the bust yeah but when you look back at those cycles of comic books where you know something becomes popular and then they release too much of it and then they have to cut back do you see any parallels to today with those past comic book business cycles oh um yeah i'd like to think that especially because we're dealing with the people who are have dealt with those comic book cycles and disney which has gone through a couple booms and busts of its own uh like they were mired in a whole, what would Walt do period after Walt Disney died, where it's just like

nobody, they were all frozen in fear to like hurt the brand. And just, it wasn't until Michael Eisner kind of came and sort of kicked off that. Another great book, Disney Wars, I would consider a prequel to our book. But yeah, I think they've learned a few things, but they can't outrun that this is the capitalist cycle for franchise storytelling. What we've learned is nothing ever really dies uh we have something that i have been just uh calling zombie franchises where it's like you're indiana jones maybe you're star wars right now definitely you're ghostbusters right now where it's like everybody wants these things to continue but they can't find where the hit is they can't get the foothold to figure out oh this is the thing we're doing because they're

pulling so much on nostalgia they're too afraid they're like this is what ghostbusters is this is what star wars is this is i'm trying to stick just to disney franchises because i don't want to trash anybody else they have to because disney is an ip company because at some point uh when bob eiger was the ceo he was like creating is so much more difficult than buying and infusing that into your brand they need to figure out a way to tell better stories they need to reorient to the story place and i think that's something that they're slowly working their way back to because before they were just like what's the spectacle oh you want to see how many avengers can we put in one movie you'll show up for that and now that people won't show up for that hopefully they go

back to the story because i think if you're chasing a spectacle movie you're making a theme park ride and like that's not how drama should work for what it's worth we got tim sparks on his engineer you got two slow nods from him which is tough to get you got a slow nod one when it when you said earlier people want to see superheroes fighting each other yes and then slow nod number two came when you said they're treating basically the the franchises are being treated too preciously yes um something also happened in for the business of disney in the business of the mcu where when they went to comic con they used to be able to put up a box that said untitled marvel project yeah and i think that was for more financial analysts than the fans yeah

because they could pencil in a certain return on that that was that seemed like a guarantee and now i mean it seems like maybe ant-man quantum mania was the end of that hmm yeah yeah and i guess does that does that change the type of storytelling they do does that change the business of marvel uh i the weird thing about marvel is i still can't think of anything that they just stopped so if they say it's in development they don't stop developing it ever like their first black panther scripts were coming out while they were still doing like phase one because they had the writers program they're just like go for it so all of these untitled projects they are definitely planting a flag mostly to scare off people last time there

was a showdown that really seemed like it was a showdown there was about a month and a half that batman v superman dawn of justice and captain america civil war were releasing on the same day and comic book fans were like yes yes and everybody else saw what it was which is two industry titans playing chicken with each other uh and eventually batman v superman moved which you know i don't know if that says anything about the quality but that's what happened and like now i think they're still doing it things if i were counter-programming against marvel i can't put my tent poles against untitled marvels i can't put my tent poles against avatar because you don't bet against james cameron and at this point i wouldn't put my tent pole against something like mufasa but i

think wicked's gonna try it anyway those are just things that disney wins but i do think you could counter program to it with the exception of like Deadpool and Wolverine Disney doesn't do blockbuster comedy so you could put something that's like big and funny and fun up against Marvel tentpole movie and I think it'll still work because these things are just becoming so self-serious like even like now I've been having friends being like you know I haven't caught up with Marvel for a while like should I go see it I'm like if you haven't seen twisters go see twisters man it's just like it's a fun movie and it's one movie I'm gonna I'm gonna put a fork in the sand to mix metaphors from this point onward i probably don't have any business

related questions and we will be doing spoilers for deadpool versus wolverine great all right what what worked what didn't work for you in deadpool wolverine mvp wesley snipes didn't think that was going to happen we when we pitched doing mcu the reign of marvel studios the first time the first outline that i pitched to gavin and joanna was blade to blade because maher shalali had just been announced as Blade at Comic-Con. We're like, oh, this is definitely happening. The star, the title, like this is... And then like as, you know, things went on,

it was like, oh, nope, nope. It's not going to be Blade to Blade. So seeing Wesley Snipes show up, especially since he and Ryan Reynolds did not get along on the set of Blade Trinity and the joke they have in there, the first one where Blade tells Deadpool, I don't like you.

And his response is, you never did. I'm just like, this is everything I want. Yeah. It was a weird shot to hear Wesley Snipes say there will only be one blade and that i i wondered how that happened i think it's interesting because there really is no plot to the movie nope and at the same time this is a movie that makes fun of a lot of superhero style uh storytelling but also breaks a lot of traditional rules of storytelling like they bring in matthew mcfadden early is mr paradox they tell you what type of character he is

and how he may be sort of a quirky, fun villain and then literally immediately sidelined him for the rest of the movie. And I was like, there's so much self-awareness and also so little self-awareness in this movie. Yes, I think that character was Mobius, which is, but then, I don't know, if you've seen the end of Loki season two,

couldn't be him this time. So I do think that character changed a little bit. I do think it's weird that they just give him a MacGuffin machine. And I also think it's weird that, to the contrary to what I was hearing before, the movie came out about Deadpool sort of saving these so-called anchor beings, that it was sort of everything took place in the void.

So I think it changed a little bit from the Milieu sisters who are writers on things like Bob's Burgers did a draft of this in like 2019 of Deadpool and Wolverine. And I'm convinced it is like full on X-Men, like, you know, Magneto instead of Cassandra Nova, like final fight on the Brooklyn Bridge from like X3 to sort of like fix X3, like something like that. I thought they were going to save all the X-Men from their various universes and throw them into one big fight. It became more Marvel-y, like the Void's here, Alioth is here, we got a Secret Wars comic Easter egg, like all these sorts of things. The more Marvel they made it, the more I think they also added in some of the sharper jokes.

So I think as soon as Kevin Feige presumably told the writers, like, go ahead and go for it, they really did. and they tried to not pull its punches to the point that I'm so shocked by some of the jokes they do make in here. I'm now starting to wonder why certain things aren't in here. Like Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson dated. Why is there not a Black Widow variance? Like that would have seemed like a great thing to make. Did he not do it because Blake Lively doesn't want her to talk?

Like I don't, I don't, I'm speculating now why certain seemingly very obvious jokes are not in the movie. Oh, Ryan Reynolds is a writer on the movie. So he might've had, he had some creative control on that. Oh yeah. it was also you mentioned the x-men thing and that was something that kind of like that worked for me which i was surprised by for me x-men is sort of like like the band fish but for comic books where it's extraordinarily dense to get into and the people that are into it get it and those that

don't don't right i'm on the other side for both of those things and what surprised me is they made the x-men both accessible and also not too self-serious which can be a i would say a significant problem throughout the history of the the franchise for as great as the chris claremont storytelling is right it's a lot of exposition and it's a lot of like there's not a lot of humor in there yeah ultimately i think something that i guess was a pleasant surprise is a lot of superhero movies are about battling villains this one is wolverine and deadpool are solving a business problem yeah which is a corporate merger between 20th century fox and disney and there's these moments that i think i'm sure big for some people where they bring out jennifer gardner is electra

and then they bring out uh channing tatum is um gambit is gambit thank you for saving me on that um i was pleasant are you surprised that that works for for a broad audience because they're really there's no plot it's just literally a corporate merger happening under the guise of a superhero movie yeah i think ultimately it it doesn't have a plot as much as it has one theme and i don't know if i agree with this theme but the movie hardly agrees with this theme it's like even the worst version of the ip you like deserves to end like we we shouldn't leave it like out there like hanging which is we used to call that feige fix it which is like kevin feige doesn't like to admit to mistakes he'd much rather go back and correct something that he

had previously been involved with but yeah and that's a that's an interesting thing to talk about where it's like everything deserves its end where i'm like guys all your money depends on this thing never ending like that's a very dangerous thing to say that we like deserve but then that's also i think why it ends the way it does where it's like hey guess what They're not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They're in the exact same universe they were before, except now there's a live Wolverine in there. And it ends with a shot where Wolverine and Colossus are at the table. They don't talk to each other.

I'm like, guys, you're so close. You're so close to understanding what we actually want. But then maybe like the San Diego Comic-Con panel, just right at the end, they feel like they have to say something. And I'm like, step too far, guys. I mean, that's that's a theme throughout Kevin Feige's reign as the head of Marvel, which is that he understands the comic book audience, but he's not exactly going to serve them. Right. Which is if we were doing if you were doing the Infinity War saga, it would be about Thanos trying to please the mistress of death and oppress her. So they take certain elements and then just completely throw away the rest. And I think that also gives me some hope for Secret Wars, which like like and that's coming in 2026, 2027, like Deadpool is kind of inherently cynical.

It was a comic book event that was literally made to sell toys, and one where the title came from asking a group of children what words sound cool together, and then they got Secret Wars. Right. I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what they think that movie is going to be about. Because if you read the previous Secret Wars, it was run by the Beyonder, and I do think they were planning on making the Beyonder a Kang variant and therefore folding it into there. but now with Robert Downey Jr.'s Doom you look at the Hickman Secret Wars Doom is sort of running that whole thing and why wouldn't you put Robert Downey Jr. at the top

of all that because that buys you into two different movies but what are you saying? Because Secret Wars needs to be the ending that you're saying everybody deserves we need to reboot something

I think that they were very interested after Endgame in introducing some of these new heroes none of them really caught on as much as they wanted to but they also haven't recast they haven't had a lot of successful passing on the mantle uh we haven't seen a lot with kate bishop's hawkeye since she's been hawkeye she's been teased for young avengers but who knows if we're ever going to see that um the new captain america we're going to give him a shot next february but let's see if he can outgross chris evans they already broke the glass on that chris evans is in deadpool and wolverine so everybody's already willing to come

back some of these things need to end you either need to find a legacy character you need to find a new face you need to make a new star because like we don't know what robert downey jr has been paid yet we know that the russo brothers are getting around 80 million dollars to direct both movies and it's reported by variety that robert downey jr is getting significantly more that's their quote yeah than 80 million dollars he does not have a brother i assumed if he broke keanu reeves is 153 million for matrix two and three we would know about it but this is very similar and it's going to get very close to it because he's in for two movies they can't keep doing that part of ike perlmutter's problem with civil war was like you're bringing in robert downey jr as a

lead player we can't keep paying him robert downey jr by starring in the first iron man and putting sequel options in there when he got like you know five hundred thousand dollars for the first iron man but he's like guess what i'm gonna get more for each additional one and then that was the hit and they built the universe off his back he's made like 700 million dollars or something like off iron man in his lifetime and now we're just gonna keep giving more to him like that's not sustainable i i know you guys love the character of iron man but you have pedro pascal over on the star wars side just doing a voiceover performance like it can't be that hard to get the cost down so like

Scar Doom and Doomsday and Secret Wars pay Robert Downey Jr. to play Iron Man and then get out of there like get out of there that's too much money

to be paying for that performance oh and he's got a he's gonna have some body doubles when Doom's wearing that mask he's already he's already barely

in the movies that he's in for the Marvel Studios it's a good gig if you can get it so you talked about the star making problem and one thing

that I think also is maybe a long term problem as I continue to concern troll is superhero movies kind of had this, in professional wrestling, it's kayfabe, which is the understanding that the audience knows the storyline is fake. The wrestlers know that the storyline is created, but they're still going to try to create some drama around it and have stakes there.

In one of the more cynical parts of Wolverine and Deadpool, it seems like that's completely broken, where there's just fighting with no stakes. There's a lot of almost just sparring matches going on between Wolverine and Deadpool. We've had we've had the lesson that, like, not only do character deaths mean nothing, they're also going to come back fairly immediately after they die. I don't know. Dave, am I jaded or is this a real like is this a real problem for the long term future? It's all about the container that the story is in for me. I'm a big I previously said things like spoilers don't matter. it's not ruining it's enriching because if it if any story depends on the surprise of something

happening that's not true there have been smarter people than me that whose name i can't pull out of ether right now that have said like people should be able to finish chapters of books knowing what's going to happen because that's how you structure a story as you lead up to an event that happens and then what you feel when that event happens is because of everything that came before it so you could cynically use that you could cast robert downey jr as dr doom and my grandma's going to show up thinking tony stark's the villain that could work great for you or you could do which what i'm hoping they're going to do for all of us is we show up for doomsday or the ending of fantastic four and they tell us why this is happening in a way that makes sense and marvel

can do it because in 2008 nobody but comic nerds knew what the infinity stones were and what they did and now there's a whole bunch of 12 year olds who know the name of all the stones and well the stones powers are so like they're able to educate an audience the multiverse's saga is educating an audience about what you're talking about which is like we could kill people we could do versions of people we can give you that that hit what you want is like in this movie in this story in this episode the thing that you want happens but then we're going to move on because it's a wide multiverse and the story's never going to end i think eventually the bubble that we're seeing isn't a Marvel Studios bubble.

It's a franchise bubble. And the way it sort of pops is when it gets so far up its own butt that it forgets that it needs to, you know, Deadpool and Wolverine. Wolverine putting on his masks to fight a hundred Deadpools that he could never kill works once.

And they did it. And every screening that I've been at, critic screening included, gets cheers when he puts the mask on. so great perfect can't do that again though so i don't know what you're saving for secret wars or anything but you're burning a whole bunch of stuff but ultimately i think like it all stories are work in their own container because that's the only thing you could have control over and when we talk about movies that have gotten out of control let's say like zach snyder's dceu

he did a superman movie that was exactly what he pitched and then they're like okay we're going to buy three more. And that's not how you do something. You take it one at a time and that's how you have coherence. You have control and the team is pushing everything forward. And you could throw some stuff into the ether for another movie to pick up, but being like, okay, and then two movies later, this will happen. Like, you don't know, you don't know what's going to happen two movies later. So everything needs to be very well contained. That being said, you know, Christianity, one of the biggest religions in the world, people don't have to stay dead for it to be an emotionally powerful experience. That was a good place to end it. Dave Gonzalez, I appreciate you being

here physically. We're in person in Denver. And thank you for your time and your insight. Thank you very much. As always, people on the program may have interests 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. Thank you.