The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards https://amzn.to/3SwQYwy INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A superb chronicle of how Marvel Studios conquered Hollywood…. This definitive account of the Hollywood juggernaut thrills." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review The unauthorized, behind-the-scenes story of the stunning rise―and suddenly uncertain reign―of the most transformative cultural phenomenon of our time: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Entertainment was a moribund toymaker not even twenty years ago. Today, Marvel Studios is the dominant player both in Hollywood and in global pop culture. How did an upstart studio conquer the world? In MCU, beloved culture writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards draw on more than a hundred interviews with actors, producers, directors, and writers to present the definitive chronicle of Marvel Studios and its sole, ongoing production, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For all its outward success, the studio was forged by near-constant conflict, from the contentious hiring of Robert Downey Jr. for its 2008 debut, Iron Man, all the way up to the disappointment of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and shocking departures of multiple Marvel executives in 2023. Throughout, the authors demonstrate that the original genius of Marvel was its resurrection and modification of Hollywood’s old studio system. But will it survive its own spectacular achievements? Dishy and authoritative, MCU is the first book to tell the Marvel Studios story in full―and an essential, effervescent account of American mass culture. Show Notes About The Guest(s): Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez are authors and podcasters who have worked together for over a decade. Joanna has hosted podcasts about film and television for years and wrote for Vanity Fair for eight years. She is currently at The Ringer, where she continues to podcast about film and television. Dave has been writing about film for the internet for 15 years and has a passion for the business of storytelling in the entertainment industry. Summary: Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez join Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss their new book, "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios." The book provides a comprehensive overview of Marvel Studios, from its inception in 2008 with the release of "Iron Man" to its current status as a cultural and financial powerhouse in Hollywood. The authors delve into the business deals, creative decisions, and behind-the-scenes stories that have shaped Marvel Studios into the success it is today. They also explore the impact of Marvel Studios on the film industry and its ability to captivate audiences with its superhero movies. Key Takeaways: Marvel Studios started as a scrappy underdog, leveraging lesser-known characters like Iron Man and the Hulk to build its brand. The success of Marvel Studios can be attributed to its ability to push boundaries and take risks, such as casting Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. The creative committee at Marvel East Coast, led by Ike Perlmutter, initially had regressive ideas about representation in superhero movies, but Marvel West Coast eventually broke free from their influence. "Guardians of the Galaxy" was a turning point for Marvel Studios, proving that audiences were willing to embrace unconventional characters and stories. The future of Marvel Studios lies in its ability to continue pushing boundaries and telling fresh, engaging stories that resonate with audiences. Quotes: "We got as close as we could to current events as we could, including things that happened over the summer of this year into the book to try to explain how a superhero movie studio could take over Hollywood for well over a decade." - Joanna Robinson "Marvel Studios will finish up movies weeks before they release because that's what worked for them on the first Iron Man." - Dave Gonzalez

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go. When the fat lady sings the opera line from the Bugs Bunny opera singer, if you remember her with the big iron lady, that's when you know the show is real. Welcome to the show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. Shut up already. Sit down. Calm down.

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and join the big LinkedIn group, LinkedIn newsletter. Also go to Chris Foss Facebook.com is the new thing we just started where you can chat with the show as we go along and do stuff, find out backstories on authors and all that good stuff as well. Today we have two amazing

authors on the show. They've got their new book that just came out October 10th, 2023, MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios. You may have heard of it and all that good stuff. Joanna Robinson joins us on the show and Dave Gonzalez. Welcome to the show, folks. How are you? Oh, so good. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we're excited to become a thought leader. It's going to be great. Yeah, you guys are thinking thought leaders. You know, it takes a lot of smarts to write a book and do the research and stuff.

Unless you read my book. So welcome to the show, you two. Let me start by having you each give us a bio rundown on both of you. Yeah, we have worked together for over a decade we are podcasters we're writers i'll let dave get into his specifics um but i've hosted podcasts about film and television for years and years i wrote for vanity fair for eight years and i'm currently at the ringer doing podcasting there um again about film and and television. So, you know, this has been in our blood for a very long time, for sure. There you go. Dave?

Oh, yeah, I started writing about film for the internet probably about 15 years ago. And then also when I started podcasting with Joanna, we really sort of drilled down on the podcast that we were both doing on sort of the power of taking adaptation pieces. So Game of Thrones becoming a show or in this case, Marvel Studios sort of using the IP of the comic book properties to create a successful movie studio. So that's always interest me sort of like the franchise uh business aspect where money making meets storytelling is where i love talking about entertainment always follow the money uh so uh give us a 30 000 overview of the book and what it entails

yeah this uh the phrase we love to use increasingly these days is soup to nuts trying to give you the whole scope of marvel studios from its inception and the first film it made which was iron man 2008 to current day we got as close as we could eventually you have to turn your book in eventually you have to stop writing but we got as close to current events as we could uh including things that happened you know over the summer of this year into the book to try to explain how a superhero movie studio could take over Hollywood for well over a decade become the biggest cultural and to your point about money you know financial success that Hollywood had seen over the last decade plus so So that was really interesting to

us. We are Marvel fans, but this isn't just a fandom book. This is a book for people who love film history. This is a book for people who care about the business of Marvel because it starts on a bunch of sort of unbelievable business deals is how it all came together in the first place. It's just one of our biggest, most mythic stories that shaped the culture for, like I said, over a decade. There you go. Dave, any thoughts you want to kick in? I mean, I would jump in with some stuff that it isn't.

This isn't about Marvel Comics publishing. So if you're worried about needing to have like 50 years of backstory, don't worry, we'll let you know when it's relevant and it is not a movie by movie breakdown of things you need to know about the marvel cinematic universe uh there are other great outlets for those sort of type of things but as joanna outlined we're sort of about the entirety of marvel studios who was controlling who was making what movies when and how they sort of uh did things like execute great in the China market early in the 2010s to become the biggest thing that we've seen in the 21st century so far. How did they compare in Hollywood in size to like other studios and other brands now?

In size? I mean, they're still surprisingly small for the amount of box office cash that they're responsible for that might be part of the problem that they're dealing with right now but you know they're tucked in under the disney umbrella right they're owned by disney and so marvel and pixar and lucasfilm all owned by disney are sort of boutique studios to a certain degree compared to something like warner brothers or paramount etc um yeah dave what do you think about the size question yeah they're um a sort of a medium sized studio which i think became a much more viable option i think in the way independent

filmmaking sort of took over at the early 90s uh so like they are probably the size of something like a a24 or what we would categorize as an indie studio they just have the financial backing of mouse house which allows them to uh try some bigger budgeted things now my understanding and correct me if i'm wrong because you guys wrote the book and i didn't. But Marvel was pretty down and out, wasn't it? When the comics and the people on the IP originally, weren't they pretty much down and out

when they came along, whoever it was that came along to turn this into Hollywood stuff? Yeah, full-on bankrupt. That's where we sort of start our book. I was going to was gonna say but i couldn't remember right couldn't get downer or outer i wasn't sure yeah so in the early 90s they had some success especially on the fox animated side because uh the people who ended up uh saving marvel

from bankruptcy were ike perlmutter and avi arad who were uh members of toybiz and so they were they got a perpetual license for marvel toys in the early 90s and they were able to sort of uh leverage that into some animated series and really without having something like the x-men animated series selling toys on fox kids you wouldn't have eventually gotten to something like the 2000 x-men that is all from the uh aviara and ike perlmutter partnership and then like around 1998 uh the company went bankrupt as it was sort of being split into i would classify them as junk bonds legally i don't think i could say they're all junk bonds but they were using the uh marvel company to produce value for uh the parent company and that the bottom fell out of that leading to a large

bankruptcy struggle and i pro motor and avi arad realized that given the deal that they had with toy biz not only would they be losing their license they'd be losing board seats at toy biz and they really didn't want to give that to a corporate raider and so they stepped in and they saved marvel and rather than selling it off for, they decided they were going to run it. And one of the best ways to execute that IP was to get Marvel in theaters. And that's what leads to things like X-Men and Spider-Man in 2002. You know, you kind of have to feel stupid if you're running that company and it ran into bankruptcy. You're just like, geez, we just had to take it to Hollywood.

But maybe it wouldn't have worked because maybe CGI hadn't gotten to that point or something yet. I mean, they bought Fleer during the baseball strike. And they bought an Italian sticker company right before it all went bankrupt. So I don't know if we could blame it on not handling Marvel correctly. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I think the success of Tim Burton's Batman in the 80s certainly is part of the brick that builds this whole thing so there was an appetite for superhero cinema um the batmania summer batmania

is what we like to call uh 89 but um to your point about visual effects like then we got a string of stuff in the 90s that wasn't quite all there um you know until really i would say you know sam raimi spider-man films and the early aughts and then christopher nolan batman films like all of those started to uh present a different kind of future for what a superhero movie might look like there you go uh so were you guys able to interview people from Marvel Studios, get inside or ex-executives or whatever to try and, my understanding is basically you try and map out the story and how they created the hits, maybe some of the disappointments and walk themselves through becoming this powerhouse. Yeah. So I was lucky enough to be on set for Avengers Endgame, the last sort of big Avengers movie that they made when I was working at Vanity Fair. I did a cover story for Vanity Fair on Marvel,

which meant I got to talk to all the Avengers actors and I got to talk to the head of the studio, Kevin Feige, for a couple hours. And only a fraction of those interviews made them into the magazine story so we were able to sort of dig into those for the book we talked to over 100 people including screenwriters actors um you know executives all that sort of stuff like tons of people production designers everyone that we could could find who wanted to talk about Marvel

but we were also obstructed. Fairly early on by Disney. Who didn't want us to write this book. And so we managed to talk to a lot of people. Both on the record and off. We managed to. I can now confidently say. I wasn't sure actually when we published it.

But I have since heard from people who worked there. That we got the story correct. Like we did it um despite the fact that disney was trying to fight us the whole time and though it was frustrating to hear from people that they wanted to talk to us but disney told them not to at the end of the day this sounds like spin but like i do think it makes a better book for us to sort of be you know that we're not smoothing anything over or playing nice or anything like that,

because the studio was not holding any doors open for us. They slammed doors in our faces. So, you know, we're not, the book is not like out to get them or anything like that, but it's just sort of like, this is,

we did not put on any gloves when we, when we wrote these stories. So yeah. The, the journey of the journey in history of, uh, this brand through Hollywood, you know,

it kind of seemed like for a time there that, you know, comic books, I grew up with comic books. We used to hoard them. We used to keep them in our fort out back in a, in a special waterproof box. And we would find any place we could find comics.

We'd, we'd, uh, grab ahold of them and put them in the storage that we had. But it kind of seemed like comic booking had become kind of this niche thing or kind of a nerdy side thing. And it was like, there's some guys who do that, and I don't think they've seen Women Naked,

so they're doing the comics thing. And then it kind of exploded i don't know if comic-con exploded before uh the marvel studios started but i remember seeing the comic-con stuff start and just seeing people that it really it became like basically what i'm trying to say it seemed to have gone from something very niche to mainstream where people and maybe it was i i think i heard somebody say some of the world events the world just got so damn depressing maybe after 9-11 and uh other things it seemed like there was a rise of a need for a superman or a superhero we we kind of as a culture population or humanity just went we need to start believing something greater because our humans keep failing us maybe

i don't know is there any truth to any of that wandering i mean i think definitely we have a chapter uh that's one of our chapters of the development of iron man that is sort of like not only did they pick a character that not a lot of marvel comics fans were huge fans of at that point but they picked a guy whose arc is uh he is a billionaire weapons manufacturer and he seems somehow surprised that his weapons are killing innocent people and that makes him turn himself into a weapon which was kind of the story that we needed at that time period in 2008 to reckon with what we of america had become. But starting there, as opposed to starting where DC usually starts,

which is Batman, which is a very similar billionaire who's had too much, or Superman, which is just, let's just push as much good as we can into the world, are less exciting than something like Iron Man that not only provided I think the same sort of optimism

like Chris Nolan Batman could be in terms of iron man that uh not only provided i think the same sort of optimism like chris nolan batman could be in terms of uh you know we're going to be able to rise above this particular turmoil uh but also really quickly uh discarded with secret identities and stuff so let's let our heroes be the heroes that they need to be is something that marvel uh would have embraced regardless of time period and country but really was able to execute at that particular time period where they started there was a version of that original iron man movie that was a period piece set around sort of like the vietnam war and they decided i mean 9-11 is very much involved in the conversation around iron man and also the subsequent iraq war like

very very much uh mixed into the making of that and if you look at those other successful superhero franchises that came before spider-man has spider-man sam raimi spider-man has like an overt 9-11 stronger together we love new New York sort of moment to it. Batman also, Nolan's Batman series also seems like it's a direct conversation with the Iraq war with 9-11. The thing that I love to point out that blows people's minds is that the first Harry Potter film and the first Lord of the Rings film came out within months. Both came out within months of 9-11. And both those franchises exploded so i it is my thesis that um you know at least from a u.s centric perspective 9-11 really kicked off this era of fantasy storytelling high fantasy storytelling superhero storytelling that felt like a comfort we needed um a sort of clear black and

white morality that we felt like we needed at the time. I think you said it perfectly. We needed that clear black and white morality. It seemed like we reached a point where reality was just getting a little too harsh. I mean, 2008, of course, there was the big recession, the great recession, as I like to call it. And it was a dark time. And people, I guess, need to believe in more of a higher power, uh,

for that sort of stuff. Um, I, I remember thinking, and you guys talk a little bit about this in the book about, um, picking Robert Downey Jr. Who's an incredible actor,

but I mean, he came with issues, I think at the time, or at least, you know, his prior history of, of alcohol and drugs and rehab, where he kind of fallen away out of alcohol and drugs and rehab where he kind of

fallen away out of hollywood for a while where he worked on that so but still just an astounding actor but you know i remember when they launched iron man i remember thinking in my head jesus is that the like iron man that's kind of down the line of you know comic book characters like what the hell you weren't collecting iron man comics i don't think i was into it yeah no no no no i think i think we had a whole lot of other things first so yeah and so they had to take a risk on that i imagine because they're betting the farm a couple things are going on like there's this big merrill lynch deal they made to get all the money that they needed for the studio in the first place and in order to do that they did as you as you pointed out they had a risk they leveraged a bunch of

characters against that deal and if they didn't make back the money in time they were going to have to give over iron man captain america thor black panther all these various characters that they had leveraged at the same time they don't own some of their bigger ticket heroes like the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man. They had given all those, the rights to all those characters away to other studios. So they had what I believe Variety at the time called like the B-list, like the B-string superheroes.

Yeah, and they're like, we're going to do Iron Man, we're going to do the Hulk, we're going to do Captain America like we're gonna do iron man we're gonna do the hulk we do captain america we're gonna do thor um they started with iron man they started with the hulk this this this is part of the book that i love they started with iron man because they were market testing these characters they had you know these b-list characters to pick from quote unquote b-list to pick from and um they were market testing them with kids and the kids knew nothing about like any of these characters but they're they loved the toy the iron man toy just thought the iron man toy was so much cooler than the captain america toy or the thor toy and then hulk as a toy as a piece of merchandise had always sold well for them oh yeah right you know and they like

you know going back to the tv show and further and they're like hulk yeah hulk smash all that so that's you because of like a toy focused group with kids is why we started with iron man and dave do you want to tell the robert downey jr casting story oh yeah because they were flying by the seat of their pants or uh hands and feet or be the case of iron man uh but john favreau was given a lot of leeway to develop what a marvel movie was how a marvel production operated and eventually you know it came down to one of the first big decisions where there was some differentiation is john favreau was like uh robert downey jr like this is the guy the fans will love him. He's ready to come back.

We could get him for a price that we wouldn't be able to get other actors for. And Marvel Entertainment on the East Coast, who's trying to control the whole brand, is like, well, what if we do like a Timothy Oliphant or something like that? it comes to be like this sort of showdown that ends when casting director Sarah Finn, Jon Favreau, Kevin Feige convinced Robert Downey Jr. to come in and put his self on tape. And so he does like three scenes and that tape gets passed around and they're like, okay,

we could do Robert Downey Jr. now. But the improvisational nature of the production continued throughout the first one, which is sort of why even to this day, Marvel studios will finish up movies weeks before they release because that's what worked for them on the first iron man the jokey tone uh mixed with a billionaire weapons manufacturer worked for them so uh marvel studios

movies sense of sort of used iron man as a template which is weird because it's the most independently minded of all their productions and downyey's tone, his sort of snarky, wise-ass tone, if I can say wise-ass on a podcast, filtered down through the years and just really set the whole tone for the entire franchise. He kind of has that Elon Musk cockiness, at least when he acts. Certainly Tony Stark does, for sure. Yeah.

He's so vibe. In fact, I don't know maybe i think elon might have copied it from him because uh i don't know i've seen early stuff from what about the what about the choice of john favreau i mean here's a guy made one of my favorite movies of all time swingers yeah and most of his movies up until that point i'm looking at his imdb uh i mean we're just kind of relationship movies and kind of goofy rom-cons i guess maybe you call it and then all of a sudden you know i mean how does he get the part for iron man to launch the make or break for this whole this whole uh thing believe it or not it's elf elf is the movie that captures marvel's attention because he makes up

because originally they wanted fab favreau was talking about doing the captain america movie and since captain america winds up eventually being this sort of like fish out of water you know this this guy oh you're strange modern world i don't understand it that's what elf is and that's what like captain america you know an original concept they had for captain america was so, let's get the elf guy to do Captain America. And then he wound up working on Iron Man instead. But the thing that I love that's on Jon Favreau's IMDb before

Iron Man that actually has a huge influence on the MCU is the movie Zathura, which is this Jumanji sequel that not a ton of people necessarily saw. But Favreau brought a bunch of people who worked on Zathura, including like Louis Desposito,

who is the number two at Marvel studios right now, production designers, you know, concept artists, all these people. He brought all these people from Zathura over into Marvel to make Iron Man. And a lot of them just stayed. So you'll find like a lot of people with Zathura on their IMDb are still

kicking around marvel studios which i kind of love there you go and so you you cover it up i guess imagine through disney buying in 2009 oh yeah we go all the way to yeah the beginning of 2023 so disney buys it out uh they have great success and then they have to jump into whatever happened with disney plus and we try to get our hands around that as much as anybody can these days yeah it's kind of crazy what's going on with uh didn't they just increase their prices again or am i thinking apple all of them did all of them just increased their prices oh because probably because the new the strike from uh what was going on with the strike right i think it's more that they just like literally were not

turning a profit they were they were under pricing the product and they were just hoping to kill the competition by now so that they would be the only ones left standing but that hasn't been the case the the streaming wars go ever on and they're still waiting to turn a profit on them and it'll be interesting to see how the strike i I believe it's settled now, isn't it? The writer's strike is still ongoing. Yeah. It's going to be interesting how that plays into streaming services, profitability costs,

and all that good stuff. Um, because, uh, I imagine they're getting more money or it's a better deal. At least those that have settled. Uh, I know that,

uh, Robert Iger has talked about how they're being to quit publishing so much it's a better deal at least those that have settled uh i know that uh robert eiger has talked about how they're they need to quit publishing so much stuff and maybe scarcity is is better yeah i think that's a problem that he is right to point out that needs solving it's also a problem he caused yeah yeah because at the end of his tenure he's on top of the world they're you know releasing rise of skywalker they've acquired fox uh there's you know more marvel movies come come out and so it's like sort of on his way out the door he's like oh and all my boutique studios that used to be just for theaters they're going to be making content for disney plus okay bye and bob chakbeck come in uh who was

more of a parks businessman and uh through that sort of uh he's like okay you heard eiger uh we have to have content for disney plus we're living in a subscriber game at this point in the streaming wars so they're like what's going to get us the most subscribers and then you have you know a fan event where kevin feige and Feige and Kathleen Kennedy have to go out and say, here's all the stuff we're working on, even though they may not have been ready to announce some of those things, because some of those things we still haven't seen on screen. Yeah. It's really interesting, the grab bag that everyone's after now between all the streaming services.

In fact, I can't even keep up with them. I think i finally just signed up with them all and just gave up trying to fight whatever that's what they want that's you you're being the the perfect streaming i think i'm paying definitely more than what i used to pay for cable i was an early unplugger absolutely but now i'm just being bent over and uh like i should probably just beg for xfinity to take me back or something for cable i remember when there was 500 channels and nothing to watch and now i just pay twice as much for the same i had i had one of those cranky cable cutting moments the yesterday because i was trying to find a movie it was like you know just like a classic movie from the 90s or early i can't remember what it was um like one of the ones that used to play like all the time on tnt or whatever and i couldn't

find it streaming anywhere i had to rent it i couldn't find it streaming anywhere for free and i was like i subscribe to all of these streaming platforms and not a single one of them has oh it was the no it was the notebook the notebook i was like not a single popular movie too has the notebook under the deal you know what i mean i have to rent it fine i'll rent it you know but i was just sort of like i was i i did have i try not to be like too cranky old man shakes fists at clouds about like in my day you know these it wasn't like this but um but yeah yeah welcome to that and I think Apple just played some sort of game where they made it so if you subscribe

to everything individually, it's really painful, but if you subscribe to the big package, it's like cheap or something kind of for more of their accessories and whatever the hell they're doing over there. I think Android hasn't gone down that road.

Yeah, I mean, I don't and whatever the hell they're doing over there. Oh, okay. Thank God Android hasn't gone down that road. A little bundle deal. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the breaking point of the streaming wars are going to be. I've been waiting for that bubble to pop for a really long time. But people keep subscribing. I said yes to all of the fee hikes that I just got alerts for.

It's literally our job to watch all this stuff. Yeah, so at least you can write it off. I can make that excuse, but at some point it's got to stop. Right. In theory, I need to start a, I need to start a TV movie, uh, company so I can write off all the damn subscriptions. I can't even watch them all. Like, I don't even know how I just, I'm just so frustrated. Like you mentioned where I'm just like, Hey, I want to watch, I don't even know. I'm just so frustrated, like you mentioned, where I'm just like, hey, I want to watch, I don't know, one of my favorite movies, Heat. I want to see that again.

Heat, the notebook of the 90s. Yeah. More murdering. A little more murdering. I guess Disney just is taking full control or fully bought out now. I don't know which hulu so that kind of takes one of the players off the table i guess there are rumors that apple might

buy disney um that would be really freaking and you want to talk about corning the market i mean we thought that that's what was going to happen when disney bought fox but he bought fox and still feels like there's a lot of options out there. But if Apple buys Disney. But again, I'm not rooting for mega corporations either. So I don't know what to say about all this. You know, I noticed that my YouTube TV too has it so I can do, I think they've got two or three of the streaming services that you can buy through them. So I don't have to be hopping all over the place.

You know, I think they've got, I think they think they got, uh, what's the one that starts with the P it's the old paramount plus paramount plus. And then I think they've got, uh, HBO and I think you have Peacock and stuff. So I think you can kind of try and centralize them. Yeah. I go on, I go so many times on, on Google and I'm like, where do I stream XYZ movie I want to watch? And thankfully, most things are centralized on Pornhub. Luckily, E-Bob's world still exists.

I was going to say, by the way, since you mentioned Pornhub, when you were like, we had a watertight box That we put our comics in in the treehouse Was it just comics in the waterproof Box that you had out in the woods or We were we were 10 to 12 year old boys I have no Comment But there was there was some Parental father reading

Of private stashes That and I remember we were Like what do you do with that oh that we couldn't we couldn't figure out we were at the age where we weren't quite sure what any of that was about but we're like these people are really into this for some reason so maybe i keep hearing the articles are amazing the comics are great that's right the uh there you go uh so uh what do you think maybe uh you want to tease any things that people are going to be

surprised about, if I can learn to pronounce things? I was very excited and it was part of sort of the origin story of the book to learn more about the story of David Maisel, who's one of the key executives, if not the key

executive that made marvel studios possible but he's the guy who saw uh 2003's daredevil the ben affleck one and was like surely there is a way you could be doing better with these and so through his entertainment context he was able to get a meeting with ike perlmutter over lunch at mar-a-lago in 2004 and he proposed to ike he's like what what if you had your own studio so instead of licensing out spider-man sony gets to make a spider-man movie you get maybe 30 of the profits what if you had all the profits that then you could use as you see fit and so i pro butter was really interested in that but being that he's a shrewd businessman that i pro butter he's like only come back to me if i could pitch it to the

board with zero money down so that is where david mazel got to work and through pre-selling some rights to movies which is very normal and mortgaging those characters to merrill lynch for over 500 million dollars which is very not normal. They're able to start Marvel Studios. And David Maisel was their first president and was sort of working along with Kevin Feige and Avi Arad. And then David Maisel is the one who gets Bob Iger in touch with Ike Perlmutter in 2009 to start the Disney process. So he was just so integral to the big things.

And when we started this book, there was a lot of different narratives and there was a lot of i think uh motivation to you know be like kevin feige he's at the top now he was always on his way there and we discovered that like he was constantly working but it's really these like very key business decisions with david mazel oh third one i really like he got the rights to use the hulk the incredible hulk is a co-production with universal yeah but he could then marvel can then use the hulk as long as it didn't have hulk in the title hulk was considered a side character and they didn't have to use universal as a producing partner so he sort of reclaimed the hulk rights without letting those. With like a loophole in the contract.

Like basically they had sold the Hulk off to Universal and Universal's like, we're not giving the Hulk back. We know we kind of messed up with our Hulk movie, but we're not giving, we're not ready to give him back. And so David sits down with a contract and he like figures out via the language that Marvel studios can use the Hulk. They don't need to work with universal as long

as the movie is not called hulk so the first hulk movie they worked with universal but uh when hulk shows up at the avengers or thor ragnarok or civil uh no not that one um then you know ultron then like his name isn't in the title so they don't have to work with universal at all and that's like a language loophole in the contract that david mazel found i love that about him um yeah i still gotta do a callback joke on the mar-a-lago thing uh yeah he missed an opportunity there he could have had iron man the classified files yeah yeah i mean mar-a-lago we have a chapter called once upon a time at mar-a-lago oh yeah the fact that one of the, I would say the most consequential conversation around Marvel Studios happened at Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump was there is very, very well. Maybe it's worth $10 billion as he claims after all.

Maybe, maybe. Dave mentioned the character of Ike Perlmutter a couple times. Ike Perlmutter, this is the one that I think people will be like, well, in addition to everything that Dave said, which I also agree with. The civil war between Marvel West Coast, which is Marvel Studios and all the filmmakers over in California, and Marvel East Coast, which is the comic book company, Marvel Entertainment, their parent company.

This is like the Bloods and the Cribs of film. I mean, yeah. Rages sort of throughout the first 10 years of marvel studios um where marvel east coast at first says go ahead make your little movies don't don't cost us any money but go ahead make your little movies you go ahead and try sure that's cute and then they make iron man and iron man is just this like bonanza hit makes all this money is so popular and then all of a sudden marvel east coast is like um actually uh we would like to be involved with this like we uh we see the potential for money we feel like we have a lot of opinions we want to give so they form something called the creative

committee in marvel east coast which is uh you know there's some great creative actual creative people on there like joe casada brian Michael Bendis, like these great comic book people. But they're also really just a female villain in Thor, the dark world, and he's like, no, one's going to buy action figures for a female villain. Like put Malekith,

the dark Barbie. Well, later they use that character. That female villain was played by Cate Blanchett and Thor Ragnarok and everyone loved it, but they couldn't do it in Thor, the dark world because Marvel East coast thinks because they come from the toy world,

they think only basically white men named Chris like sell toys. Is that the people I was talking about who haven't seen women naked? You know, like that was their thinking. They have the box in the treehouse? I mean, listen, everyone had the box in the treehouse. But so that's why for so long, long you know we didn't have female-led

superhero movies we didn't have uh non-white leads and superhero movies like all this other stuff happened because of this backroom power struggle happening between marvel west and marvel east women and girls buy merch too i mean when i was growing up even as a kid back in the day i mean we entered ga joes the girls had the Barbies. Well, I mean, the whole reason, one of the reasons, I think the main reason that Disney bought Marvel in the first place is because they thought they had like the princess market cornered and they wanted the Jedis from Lucasfilm and the superheroes from Marvel. And so they're like, we'll get the boys that way. But it's not, it's not that simple at all. And once Marvel West is finally able to make movies

like Black Panther and the first Captain Marvel movie, those movies make a billion dollars and are the biggest things in the world. So it's just like, it's ridiculous. Black Panther was so good as a movie. I never saw it, but it was so good for, it was culturally, it was so good as a movie i i never saw it but it was so good for uh it culturally uh it was so good for everybody like people love that movie and and seeing a black character in it as a lead and i think it's mostly black characters um but you know seeing something different and i think it was great

i think it was a great movie culture people really loved it i remember how heartbroken everyone was when the star passed away unfortunately yeah and we were lucky enough to talk to chadwick boseman before he passed away for the book because we've been working on this book for a very long time and um it's very it's it's frankly it's devastating because he told us this story about how he and brie larson who plays captain marvel and tom holland who plays Spider-Man were sitting around the set of Avengers Endgame talking about how they were the future of Marvel they're like look at us we're the future of Marvel you know and then like Brie Larson got hit with a bunch of dumb fanboy nonsense and Chadwick Boseman passed away and the deal between Sony and Marvel that is

behind all of the Spider-Man movies has been much more complicated than anyone hoped it would be. And so, you know, Marvel, like the best laid plans for Marvel have been sort of falling apart, which is why in the last couple of weeks, especially there's just been a lot of noise about,

is it over for Marvel? Is this the end for Marvel? Dave, what do you think? Is this the end for Marvel? No, I like it. for Marvel? Is this the end for Marvel? Dave, what do you think? Is this the end for Marvel? No. If you look at market forces of the types of entertainment that we're talking about, it's a

rough year for superhero movies. I'll give that to everybody across the board. But it's also been a rough year for a lot of different types of movies. The strikes have been pushing a lot of content, letting other content sort of having to flood in or make do with producers and ads without the stars or writers talking about it. So it's definitely been a hard time for the entertainment industry in general.

But for me, like the bellwether is Marvel as a brand is a certain type of thing and they have a lot of experience on the publishing side on the merchandising side with ways to refresh this for new audiences uh make sure that they're going to be able to do that uh so for me uh the the brand that's the bellwether is the avengers brand if they release a movie that's titled avengers whatever and it bombs then i'm going to start being worried until now i think they're just building out uh They're doing what they were directed to do by Bob Iger when he first left, which is push everything onto the field that you can and sort of bring it all together later, which is why we spent a Marvel phase,

phase four, without an Avengers movie, because it was about exploring different corners of the Marvel universe. And to some people, that's reading as fatigue. fatigue like I don't want to go see the Marvels because I don't want to watch the like multiple shows but the reality in any type of storytelling is you shouldn't have to do that type of homework it's going to work as a single piece or it's not and I think Marvel's still living and dying based more on that whereas the perception is oh I have to watch like 32 movies. I don't think you do.

Everybody's something's first movie. Yeah. You know, and the thing is, the thing I like about the Marvel stuff is there seems to be ongoing threads of stories. Like I'm, maybe it's just me or maybe I've just seen, I don't know. But watching the repetitive nature of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, I don't think Superman, well, yeah, Superman's been done. It's just kind of like, do we still have to tell the same story? I look at it the same way I do Star Wars. It's like, can we tell a story that doesn't involve the fucking Death Star already?

I'm sick of it. But maybe that's just me. I'm not that big of a fan, but that's what I liked about the Marvel movies. They seem to, you know, they seem to develop and go places, you know,

and they appeal to, I think because there's such a broad range of characters in each set, you know, men, women, you know, maybe if you like certain types of personalities, you can,

you can identify with them. Yeah. I think that's marvel at its best like marvel at its best it offers so much beyond because i think i was talking to someone where maybe it was maybe i don't know who are we talking to i don't know i don't mean to steal their idea but uh i don't think marvel is as successful if they hadn't had to be so scrappy at the beginning and figure out how to make Iron Man work and figure out how to make Captain America work and figure out how to make Thor work to an audience

that wasn't very familiar with them. Because if they had started with X-Men, Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, that's a different bar of expectations that you start with. Cause you start with the comics that everyone's familiar with that, you know, your Chris bosses had in waterproof boxes in their tree houses. You know what I mean?

Like, but if you start with these other characters, they don't have, they're not burdened with that much expectation. And so they can just, I know who I stole this from is from my colleagues, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenberg on the watch. But like the,

you don't have as much a burden of expectation and so you can just sort of dazzle them with something they haven't seen to your point with something they haven't seen before and what's so interesting is that when we talk to all these actors and filmmakers etc about what they thought the most important Marvel movie was you would expect Robert Downey Jr uh you know, Elon Musk, like to say Iron Man, obviously. Right. They said guardians of the galaxy. And I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know if you've watched those, but like, you know, the fact that the audiences saw a talking raccoon and a talking tree and everything else that was so weird about that. And we're like, yeah, okay.

We're into this too. That's when Marvel knew they could push the boundaries on certain things and still bring people along for the ride. So I think to your point, there's only so many times we can watch Uncle Ben die or the Waynes die in Crime Alley or Clark crashed to Earth in Smallville. We've seen it, but we hadn't seen a talking raccoon. And so that just felt so fresh and exciting.

I remember that was a huge hit. So final thoughts as we go out, guys, to encourage people to pick up the book and all that good stuff. Final thoughts, Dave? I think now is an especially great time if you're involved with Marvel,

if you're watching Loki, if you're going to see the Marvels, if you're excited about Marvel Spotlight kicking off in January with Echo, if you're watching Loki, if you're going to see the Marvels, if you're excited about Marvel Spotlight kicking off in January with Echo, if you're deep into it, I think this is a book for you because we are going to put it in a perspective that I encourage you to

absorb and then decide whether or not you agree or disagree with. If that's not you, if you saw Barbie Oppenheimer and Five Nights at Freddy's, boy, do I have an excellent Hollywood story to tell you about in MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios. I've been so happy since the book has been out less than a month,

but hearing from people from all sorts of fandom spectrum parts, just about how fun the book is to read. So that's something that Joanna and I wanted to try our best. We could never predict. So consumer advocacy says fun to read no matter who you are. And I would like to co-sign that. Our third co-author, Gavin Edwards, is missing from this interview, but he is the one, like I did the lion's share of the interviews.

Dave did lion's share of the interviews dave did lion's share the research gavin is the one who sort of like wove it all together in this great tapestry and because i'm complimenting gavin and not myself i feel like i can say this like what we like to say is that pages the pages turn themselves like it's just his tone is so fun and so engaging um it's just a joy like to read even the stuff that we already knew because we did the research and we did the interviews and then gavin sort of worked his magic with it and then it just sort of zips along it's really fun so yeah i was i was um i was over at a friend's house last night and her dad who's like in his 70s and doesn't really read and doesn't care about marvel told me that he's reading the book and that he's just having the best time because it's so fun to read. I was like, okay, okay.

That's one person's anecdotal evidence, but I do think that there's again, it sounds like spin, but why else are we here? I do think there's something for everyone and I do think it's a fun read. I hope you'll check it out. Hollywood is still alive.

Still alive. Even after all the things that whatever. So thank you very much. Both of you for coming on the show. Really appreciate you guys spending the time with us today. Give us your.coms. Where do you want people to find you guys in the interwebs? Yeah.

All things related to the book are at the mcubook.com. I'm at Joe wrote this on all social media platforms. Joe wrote this.com. Dave. Oh yeah. If you want to find me on Twitter X or blue sky, I'm DA seven. If you want to find me in on the meta products,

Instagram threads, I'm grumpy DA seven. Because that's the side of me that comes out with meta products. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming to the show folks. We really appreciate it.

Also, folks, order up the books wherever fine books are sold. MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios out October 10th, 2023. I'll be waiting for the second book on when Apple buys Disney or something. That would be such an

interesting purchase. I know. It'd be just crazy. Brace yourself. Brace yourself. But there you go. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss, YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1 on the tickety-tockety, and also, what is it?

Chris Voss Facebook.com, the new chat for the Chris Voss Show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good with each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.