Motley Fool Money - 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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Because Disney is an IP company, because at some point 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 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 Pohlmutter'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 spoil?

What's, we'll do us. We'll talk spoilers later. We're going to 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. I think so. I think that the post endgame darkness was a little exaggerated, but I do think that we've

rebounded from Secret Invasion and The Marvels, which I think is going to be seen, at least if everything keeps going okay, it's going to be seen. It's like the low point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe just because Secret Abation 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 do.

to change like within the Marvel universe anytime soon as they try to draw new 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 Taylor 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 while 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, X-Men's on its way. The most we could let you do is assume that Jennifer Walters had sex with Matt Murdoch.

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. 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. Yeah. 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, but I think it works best as a comedy and it's worst when it's a dog show. But let's talk about the MCU because we also had Comic Con this past weekend

with 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.

one of those baseball hats that has a Velcro patch on the front and just two patches. It says MCU-SO-over, MCU-S-U-S-O-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 in Marvel Studios, Jonathan Matrix, 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. Like 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 Thunderbolts asterisk, which I'm convinced is called something like Dark Avengers or something. But that's, you know, Marvel's suicide squads.

That's a little off center for them. And then they showed off Fantastic Four, which is going to take place in an alternate 1960s, New York, and 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. 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 a second. If you're excited about this, you're going to love all the old hits because we broke the break class in case of emergency apparently last December.

Here's Robert Danny Jr., here's the Rousseau Brothers. Avengers 5, King Dynasty, 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 flop sweat to me. And so the last like 10 minutes of the pay

I was like, 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 it. 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 feels like an announcement for the back of the house for the people who, you know, for 40,

But my mom even will be like, oh, Robert Downey Jr.'s in an Avengers again. Let's go out and see it. And I'm like, you don't need to do that, my man. Like, the MCUs still going pretty strong. And we also, other people can play Doctor Doom. Yeah. It's a big character. Oh, I think we will definitely see other people play Doctor 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 Feigy is the creative controller of it, but Ike Perlmutter, who sort of brought Marvel back out of bankruptcy see through sort of the, it would be the comic books in the 90s and the 2000s. Yeah. And now he's gone.

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

wanted to. So my understanding of how the situation work, Can 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 Prometer

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's 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, we're 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 Pearl Mudder 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 Pearl Mudder had interest in it and was still the biggest Disney shareholders because of the deal to sell Marvel. But he was losing control over Marvel, actually. And so, Isaac Pearl Mudder 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 Chaypeck, who was CEO and Bob Eiger had to come back. Isaac Prometter saw it as like, not only am I losing money, but they brought back the dude who lied to my face and then kick 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 those shares and kind of took his ball and went home. So I don't know what Ike Pearl Mudder 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 Feigy and maybe John Favreau as well have a little bit more. room to move with the characters in the movies. Yes, they could do whatever they want. Pearl Mudder 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 Aviara 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 Arred and Kevin Feigy 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.

The other thing at the end of your book, you talk about how the visual effects houses are just so stretched. And 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 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 YATSI 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 Alonzo 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. all you're throwing darts at is probably Victoria Alonzo, but that doesn't mean she's there, like, yelling at you or doing things.

So the industry needs to change overall. 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 DFX 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, it's the thing that, 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. And the thing that's interesting about is it's, it tracks. these boom and bust cycles for comic books. And in your book, which takes place over a shorter period of time, is really about the boom, and then we move to the bust. 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 today with those past comic book business cycles?

Ooh, yeah, I'd like to think that, especially because we're dealing with the people who have dealt with those comic book cycles and Disney, which has gone through a couple. booms and busts of its own. 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.

We have something that I have been just calling zombie franchises where it's like you're Indiana Jones, maybe you're Star Wars right now, definitely your 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.

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 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 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 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 franchise are being treated too preciously.

Yes. Something also happened in for the business of Disney and 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. 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 change the type of storytelling they do? Does that change the business of Marvel? 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.

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. And eventually Batman v. Superman moved, which 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 polls 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 going to 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 tent pool movie. And I think it will 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 going to 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 worked? What didn't work for you in Deadpool Wolverine?

MVP, Wesley Snipes. Didn't think that was going to happen. When we pitched doing MCU, the Rain of Marvel Studios, the first time, the first outline that I pitched to Gavin and Joanna was Blade to Blade because Mahershal Ali 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 gonna it's not gonna 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 responses you never did I'm just like this is this is everything I want yeah it was a weird shot to hear Wesley Snipes say there will only be one blade I in that I I wondered how that happened I think it's interesting 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 storytelling, but also breaks a lot of traditional rules of storytelling.

Like they bring in Matthew McFadden early as Mr. Paradox. They tell you what type of character he is and how he like may be sort of a quirky, fun villain. And then literally immediately sideline him for the rest of the movie. And I was like, there's so much self-awareness and also so little self-awareness 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 Milio sisters who are right. 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 X-Nover,

like Final Fight on the Brooklyn Bridge from like X-3 to sort of like fix X-3, like something like that. I think, 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 marvely, like the voids here, Eliath 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 Feigy

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 have had he he had some creative control on that oh yeah it was also you mentioned the X-Men thing and that was something that kind like that worked for me which I was surprised by for me, X-Men is sort of 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. 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, I would say, a significant problem throughout the history of the franchise. For as great as the Chris Claremont storytelling is, 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, which is a corporate merger between 20th Century Fox and Disney. And there's these moments that I'm sure big for some people where they bring out Jennifer Gardner is Elekt and then they bring out Channing Tatum is Gambit. Thank you for saving me on that. I was pleasant. Are you surprised that that works 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 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 heartily agrees with this theme. It's like, even the worst version of the IP you like deserves to end. Like, 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 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 Kloverine and Klaus. 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, the step too far, guys. I mean, that's a theme throughout Kevin Feigey'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 he were doing the Infinity War saga, it would be about Thanos trying to please the mistress of death and press 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 20206, 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, it's going to be interesting to see what they think that movie is going to be about. Because, like, if you read the previous Secret War, 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 Dynie Jr.'s Doom, you look at the Hickman's Secret War, as Doom is sort of running that whole thing. And, like, why wouldn't you put Robert Dany Jr. at the top of all that? Because that buys you into, like, two different movies. But, like, I don't know, what are you saying? Yeah.

Because Secret Wars needs to be the ending that you're saying everybody deserves. it needs, like, we need to reboot something. I think that they were very interested after endgame and 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. We haven't seen a lot with Kate Bishop's Hawkeyes since she's been Hawkeyes. She's been teased for Young Avengers, but who knows if we're ever going to see that. 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 Danny Jr. has been paid yet. We know that the Rousseau brothers are getting around $80 million to direct both movies. And it's reported by variety that Robert Dynie Jr. is getting significantly more.

That's their quote. Yeah. than $80 million. He does not have a brother. I assumed if he broke Keanu Reeves' $153 million for Matrix 2 and 3, 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 ProMutter'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 He got like, you know, $500,000 for the first Iron Man, but he's like, guess what? I'm going to 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 or something like off Iron Man in his lifetime. And now we're just going to keep giving more to him. Like, that's not sustainable.

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 Dooms Day 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 to, he's going to have some body doubles when Doom's wearing that mask. He's already barely in the movies that he's in for the Marvel City is. It's a good gig if you can get it.

So you talked about the Starmaking problem. And one thing that I think also is maybe a long-term problem is I continue to concern-trial is It's superhero movies kind of had this, in professional wrestling, it's K-Fabe, 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 the lesson that 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 problem? 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've previously said things like spoilers don't matter. It's not ruining.

It's enriching because if any story depends on the surprise of something happening, that's not. true. There have been smarter people than me whose name I can't pull out of the 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 Danny 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 what I'm hoping they're going to do for all of us is we show up for Dune. And my grandma's going to 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 Stone's powers are. So, like, they're able-educated audience. The multiverses 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 hit, what you want is like, in this movie, in this story, in this episode, the thing that you once 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, you know, so far up its own butt that it forgets that it needs to, you know, Deadpool and Wolverine Wolverine

Wolverine putting on his masks to fight 100 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 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 to 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 is 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 ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear.

I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.