The Journal. - With Great Power, Part 4: Endgame

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Behind the scenes of Hollywood’s most successful studio, Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter and Kevin Feige clash over budgets and creative control. Marvel lawyer John Turitzin and screenwriter Stephen McFeely share new details of a corporate civil war.  Plus, a look at the future of superhero cinema, featuring interviews with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” actor Chukwudi Iwuji and with Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson from The Ringer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previously, on With Great Power. Kevin Feige is the most successful producer of all time, by far. Not even close. Kevin just lived, ate, and breathed Marvel stories. And I know that a lot of us, including Kevin, well, that was the goal, is can we manifest this crazy dream all the way to an Avengers movie, which seemed impossible at the moment,

both technically and, you know, just seemed crazy. Ike Perlmutter was very hard on costs. He did not spend extra dollars. Ike loved running Marvelutter and Kevin Feige. On paper, they were a perfect pair. Ike was the chairman of Marvel, based in New York. He was a brilliant business executive with a sharp focus on costs. Kevin Feige ran Marvel's movie studio in Los Angeles. He was the company's creative powerhouse. Following Disney's purchase of Marvel was the company's creative powerhouse.

Following Disney's purchase of Marvel, the company had momentum. 2012's The Avengers was a massive success, the third highest grossing film in history at the time. And Feige was ready to turn Marvel Studios into a hit factory, unprecedented in modern Hollywood. But to make movies the way he wanted, Feige needed the freedom to spend money. After The Avengers, it would seem he had earned that right. But Ike Perlmutter was still obsessed with the bottom line, and he thought Feige and his team in L.A. were fiscally irresponsible.

They wanted to make the finest movie they could, and if that required money, that required money. And that led to some conflict between Marvel New York and Marvel Studios. That's John Turritzen, Marvel's longtime top lawyer and close associate of Ike's. He watched the relationship between Ike and Feige slowly deteriorate. How would you describe sort of how things felt? It was an increasingly tense situation, largely having to do with movie budgets, slowly deteriorate. How would you describe sort of how things felt? It was an increasingly tense situation,

largely having to do with movie budgets, largely having to do with controlling costs. You were seeing success after success at that point. How did it feel to sort of see this increasing tension? Ben, it was sad. We had built it. Starting in 2005, we had built Marvel Studios and were excited by the development and watched it grow. And it was sad watching it fall apart.

Together, Ike Perlmutter and Kevin Feige were building the most successful movie studio in Hollywood. But they couldn't both be in charge. Their disagreements would spark a civil war at Marvel and put the company's future at stake. From the Journal, this is With Great Power, The Rise of Superhero Cinema. I'm Ben Fritz.

This is Episode 4, Endgame. And then, finally, add Bacardi Rum. And there you have it. The perfect summer mix. Bacardi. Do what moves you. Live passionately. Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi, its trade dress and the bat device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited.

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Did somebody say Skip? As I told you earlier in the series, Ike Perlmutter is remarkably difficult to get on the record. But our colleague Robbie Whelan, who covers Disney for the Journal, managed to land a very rare interview with him. He's the first reporter who's spoken extensively on the record with Ike in decades. So Ike is extremely private. He never lets himself be photographed. He never, virtually never does interviews. And, you know, he wouldn't let us put his voice on tape. But he actually did talk to you, right?

That's right. So, Robbie, can I, for the sake of this podcast, is it cool if I call you my Ike Whisperer? Yeah, I'm the Ike Whisperer. Yeah. All right. Or you can say the Pearl, maybe the Pearl Mutterer. Pearl Mutterer. Okay. I could do that, too. Pearl Mutterterer. Pearl mutterer. Okay. I could do that too. Pearl mutterer.

I love it, man. Okay. During their call, Ike told Robbie about his humble upbringing. And even though he's now worth about $4 billion, Ike says he still thinks like, quote, the poorest guy you never met. He says this comes from the fact that when he was younger in the Middle East, he had days where there would be no food on the table for dinner. He never forgot that. And he always just kind of had a chip on his shoulder about waste and about savings.

Ike said he regularly goes to Costco for lunch with his wife, a $3 hot dog meal, including a diet Pepsi and a yogurt. When it comes to business, Ike says he keeps an equally close eye on costs. When it comes to business, Ike says he keeps an equally close eye on costs. Ike Perlmutter was laser-focused on this idea that a movie should be made as cheaply as possible, it should be marketed as cheaply as possible, and only then can you get the kind of return on investment that a movie like that should be making. How did Ike regard Hollywood and the people who made movies in Hollywood? So, disdain would be a gentle word to use to describe Ike's attitude towards Hollywood. He thinks that Hollywood people don't understand business. He thinks all they care about is the box office.

And his main problem with Hollywood people is that he says they don't understand the concept of return on investment. Ike described Hollywood as, quote, people at a country club making millions of dollars, going to big parties. But after Avengers, Marvel Studios was a power player in Hollywood. Ike said he respected Kevin Feige's creative instincts at the movie studio. But he was 3,000 miles away in New York and needed a way to keep his eye on the Hollywood operation. His vehicle to do that had an innocuous name, the Marvel Creative Committee. We would be kind of like the comic art dirtbags coming to the room, bringing our comic book truth. That's once again Brian Michael Bendis, the comic book writer you've heard from before.

Brian was a member of the creative committee. The creative committee got set up to be mostly pre-production and post-production. So we would read every draft of everything as it came in or anything Kevin wanted us to read, but it felt like almost everything that was coming in. Drafts of things, outlines of things, concepts. For example,

during the production of Iron Man 2, members of the creative committee hated how Iron Man acted when he was drunk, including a moment when he pees in his suit. That scene stayed in the movie, but the committee convinced Feige to trim some dialogue they thought made Iron Man seem cruel.

The disputes weren't just about the content of the movies, though. They also extended to budgets. The committee included Brian and a comic book editor, as well as two business executives from Marvel Entertainment in New York. Even though it's called the Creative Committee, my impression is that what the Creative Committee was doing was weighing in with a strong sort of financial perspective in mind

on certain creative decisions and sort of served as almost a check on what otherwise might have been kind of out-of-control spending from the side of the studio. Ike said he became especially frustrated during the production of 2015's Ant-Man. On screen, Ant-Man shrinks to microscopic size. But behind the scenes, the budget kept growing and growing. They would come to him and say, look, for the first Ant-Man movie, for example, they say, look, we can make this movie for $60 million. He said, great, sounds good. That's a pretty reasonable budget for a big tentpole superhero movie. Then a few weeks later, Ike and the other members of the creative committee would get a call saying, you know, actually we need $80 million to make this movie.

And then a few weeks later it would be $100 million. Ant-Man ended up costing about $160 million to make, according to Ike and another source inside Marvel. It was a box office hit, thanks in part to Paul Rudd in the leading role. I'm Ant-Man. Ant-Man. What, you haven't heard of me?

And Ant-Man earned a profit, though it might have made more if it had cost less. At times, Ike's complaints over spending didn't even have to do with how movies got made, though. He questioned every penny the studio spent. He told me a really funny story a couple days ago about how he said if there was a premiere of a Marvel movie and a thousand people were invited and they were serving Pepsi at the premiere, he would only order 800 cups. Because he would assume that not everybody's going to drink a Pepsi, first of all. But also, look, it's an easy way to save money. It's an easy way.

The guy who's the head of the studio that's making money hand over fist, he's trying to save money on popcorn and Pepsi. And that's just who Ike is. Marvel was growing into one of the most successful studios in Hollywood. But Ike remained cautious. And sometimes that caused controversy. In 2014, Feige announced plans for a bunch of new movies, including Black Panther, its first film with a black superhero in the title role, and Captain Marvel, its first film

led by a woman. The new characters promised to bring more diversity to the Avengers lineup. The new characters promised to bring more diversity to the Avengers lineup. But according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, Ike had objections. Iger recently wrote in his memoir that Ike put up roadblocks on those two movies. Ike disputes this characterization. He said he did want to make Black Panther and Captain Marvel. He just wanted the budgets for these films to be smaller because they seem riskier. John Turitzin, the Marvel lawyer, and Ike's confidant, said Ike was not being prejudiced.

Well, we had a long history doing diverse characters in our comic books. But promoting one of those characters, elevating one of those characters to a movie, and backing it with a $250 million production budget, was a whole different level of concern and a whole different level of risk. So for us, we were quite concerned about audience reaction, audience reception to breaking the mold of the traditional successful superhero movie starring a white guy. So bottom line, did Ike and, you know, the top brass at Marvel Entertainment in New York want to make Black Panther? Absolutely. Absolutely. We had a published film lineup of movies we intended to make over the next several years, and one of them was Black Panther on that list. It was on the list.

We wanted to make the movie, but we were cautious about it. We wanted to make the movie, but we were cautious about it. Increasingly, Kevin Feige and his team were fighting with Ike Perlmutter and the Marvel Creative Committee. People could tell. I asked committee member Brian Michael Bendis about it. Did you become aware, you know, as the 2010s went on, Marvel Studios was very successful. Did you become aware of any, you know, either directly or indirectly, sort of any tension arising between Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter? I didn't see it, but yes.

And I must say, truthfully, everyone was super professional and respectful in front of me. I never saw anyone throw a chair or anything. No secession moments or anything like that but um i do feel that the creative committee was a tool that was being used to help and that eventually slowly over time it was being used as a tool uh to be antagonistic or on some level again i was it never happened in front of me but i do know it went from a tool everyone was happy with to a tool that was frustrating people. Feige declined to comment through a spokeswoman. The battle between Ike Perlmutter and Kevin Feige

came to a head around one movie, the third Captain America film. Very few franchises get past three, and the threes are not a long list of great threes, right? And our thought was, you need to start breaking this thing apart so you can build it back up. Do something different.

Stephen McFeely is a screenwriter who's worked on a bunch of Marvel movies. He said Feige and his team in LA wanted to base the third Captain America film on a well-known comic storyline called Civil War. It centers on the conflicts between two warring camps of superheroes, Team Iron Man and Team Captain America. And I wasn't privy to all the things that led up to this moment, but Kevin eventually walked in one day and he just, I don't think he took two steps in the room. He said, I think we should a civil war. And then he just ran out.

Really? Yeah. And that idea that we split up the Avengers after, at that point, we'd been, how many, 12, 13 movies? I don't know. Seemed like a nice, natural progression to all of this. The filmmakers felt it was a bold idea that could shake up the genre. But members of the creative committee were concerned. a bold idea that could shake up the genre. But members of the creative committee were concerned.

The Avengers were now a super lucrative property. Breaking them up seemed dangerous. Plus, Ike and members of the committee still worried about toy sales. They thought pitting superheroes against each other would damage the value of whichever side fans disagreed with.

We were always told that certain ideas weren't going to fly because those toys don't sell, right? And so that had come up a few times. The creative committee asked for a new ending, one in which Iron Man and Captain America put aside their differences and fight a bad guy together instead of each other. I think New York was pretty adamant about not having that be the third act where our two favorite sons are fighting each other and you're breaking them up. But that note apparently just caused a great deal of angst. The creative committee thought Feige was ignoring their notes and doing whatever he wanted.

But Feige's team in L.A. thought the creative committee was meddling in their work. The directors of Captain America Civil War even threatened to quit. Stephen says he thought the entire project was in jeopardy. We're heading towards a very expensive movie, and usually you talk to people every day, and then for, I don't know, three or four days, no one returned calls. There was probably a week there when we didn't know how it was going to shake out. You were just moving ahead with hopes for the best? Yeah, I mean, we were prepping what we could prep. Was there any feeling like, oh, we're making the movie Civil War and we've sparked a bit of an internal Civil War here? Oh, I wasn't that, you know, not that cheeky in the moment. Fair enough. The clash around Captain America, Civil War sunk things to a new low.

It seemed like Feige's working relationship with Ike and the creative committee was beyond repair. Robbie says it threatened to get in the way of Marvel's mounting success. It got to the point where Kevin Feige started to get pretty annoyed, and he would push back on the recommendations that the creative committee was making.

He would push back on what Perlmutter was saying to him about how these movies should be made. And there just started to be more and more sniping back and forth between the creative committee and Feige's team about which movies to make and how to make them and where to set the budgets. Ike says he tried to salvage the relationship. In 2015, he called a meeting at Mar-a-Lago near his home in Florida. Feige and a delegation from Marvel Studios met with Ike

and members of the creative committee in a banquet room with portraits of Donald Trump on the walls. Ike told me that he, in early 2015, decided that they needed to have a peace summit. And Ike makes this opening statement where he says,

look, we've got to make peace. And he talks for about 15 minutes, explains that the studio has got to stop fighting with the creative committee in order to go forward and make the movies everyone wants to make and make the kind of financial returns that they're looking to make as well. The Mar-a-Lago meeting lasted only about an hour, according to people with knowledge of the event. And what happened? They did not make peace. They were unable to find peace.

Ike says that the meeting was, quote, a breaking point. On his way out, Feige commented that he had traveled a very long way for a very short meeting. It was now clear that Feige and Ike couldn't resolve their differences. Ike started pushing to have Feige fired, according to recent public statements from Disney CEO Bob Iger. Ike says that's not true. He says he wanted Disney to appoint a designated successor to Feige so that Marvel's entire film business wouldn't be so dependent on just one person. Feige, meanwhile, was entire film business wouldn't be so dependent on just one person. Feige, meanwhile, was making moves of his own. Kevin Feige was very unhappy, and he appealed to Bob Iger to fix the situation. And I think he saw an ally in Iger. And when things got, as he viewed it, too hard to continue doing this work under

Perlmutter, he really did go to the top dog, to the top boss, Bob Iger, and say, look, you got to help me here. In August of 2015, Iger sided with Feige. Marvel Studios became part of Disney's film operation in LA. Iger told Ike that he was no longer in charge of Marvel Studios,

and he was no longer in charge of Marvel Studios. And he was no longer in charge of Kevin Feige. Recently, Iger reflected back on the feud between Feige and Ike in an interview on CNBC. In 2015, he was intent on firing Kevin Feige, who was running Marvel's's studio or the movie making at the time. And I thought that was a mistake and stepped in to prevent that from happening. So Ike has been essentially extracted from the chain of command at Marvel Studios, and he's been sort of relegated to this side role, much less important, much more marginal, running Marvel Entertainment, which is all the licensing deals, the merchandise stuff, the video games.

But they're saying, we can no longer have you involved with these films anymore. Kevin Feige doesn't have to take Ike's notes anymore. Exactly. He doesn't have to deal with Ike's objections over budget. He doesn't have to deal with script notes from Ike and his team.

There's no more creative committee, right? Creative committee is dissolved. I asked John Teritsin if he remembered this moment when Ike lost control of Marvel Studios. Well, I knew there was some tension. I just didn't realize the tension had gone that far. And I was disappointed that it had. When you say you were disappointed,

I mean, talk about why was it disappointing, just because you like being involved in that business or because you thought it was things were working? No, not personally disappointing for me. Disappointing as a sort of a company matter. It's like we had been one company. We had been one company working together, and there was a sense that someone had been ripped out.

You know, this family had been separated. It was like a divorce, effectively like a divorce. Ike told Robbie he felt that Iger had broken the promise he made back when Disney acquired Marvel. The promise that Ike would remain in charge of all Marvel's operations. Iger declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

Over the next few years, Ike continued to criticize Disney's spending. His relationship with Iger grew increasingly contentious. Until March of this year, that is, few years, Ike continued to criticize Disney's spending. His relationship with Iger grew increasingly contentious. Until March of this year, that is, when Ike was pushed out of Disney entirely. The company said he was laid off as part of its larger cost-cutting efforts. Ike says he was fired. How much credit does Ike Perlmutter deserve for this studio that's so meaningful to so many people, and how should he be understood by Marvel fans, do you think? He deserves enormous credit. He deserves

enormous credit. There would be no Marvel Studios today if it weren't for Ike Perlmutter's support of David Maisel in raising the huge amount of financing that it took to launch Marvel Studios and to get it off the ground. And this was an enormous credit for them. I think he's proud that he was able to take a company that was completely on its back in bankruptcy in the late 1990s and turn it around and make it into a hugely successful company that Walt Disney Company bought for $4 billion. That was a huge accomplishment. After Feige gained his independence in 2015, Captain America's Civil War got made exactly as he wanted, including the big fight between

Captain America and Iron Man at the end. This doesn't have to end in a fight, Tony. You just started a war. It crushed the box office, grossing more than $1 billion. Black Panther and Captain Marvel also got made, with big budgets. Both were major hits, and they were celebrated as significant moments for representation on the big screen. The apex of Feige's vision came out in 2019, Avengers Endgame. of Foggy's vision came out in 2019. Avengers Endgame.

It was a culmination of a story that had been told across more than 20 films in more than 10 years. All right, now the wait is finally over. Thousands of fans packing into area theaters tonight for Avengers Endgame, predicted to possibly end up as the largest grossing movie of all time. The biggest box office opening ever,

Avengers Endgame, hitting 4,600 theaters across the country overnight. And people have been lining up all night long to see it. They've been in line for hours. The movie is already breaking records. Endgame grossed $2.7 billion. For a time, it was the highest grossing movie in history. It remains the second-highest today.

For Marvel fans, Endgame was the ultimate reward for a decade of moviegoing. Here's how Lashene Williams, a fan at Brooklyn Comic-Con, described the joy of that moment. It was everything. I don't think any movie could ever, ever duplicate the feeling we got watching it. We all just, oh my god. It was nuts. It was like being in a stadium. It was crazy.

Of course, I led the charge. I was the one screaming the loudest. Just 11 years after its first film, Marvel was at a peak that no studio had ever reached before, both financially and culturally. But staying on top has presented a whole new set of problems. That's after the break. Need a great reason to get up in the morning?

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Being on the set of a Marvel film, I mean, what, if anything, feels really different than, you know, some of the, you know, smaller original movies that you've done previously. The sheer scale of it. I mean, hundreds of people working on this thing, you know, and having a soundstage with literally hundreds of people making the story you're trying to tell come to life. So the scale is a big part of it. That's Chakuti Iwuji.

He plays the high evolutionary, the villain in this year's Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3. It's the 32nd Marvel Studios film in 15 years. Chakuti says Marvel today is as big as it gets, the ultimate Hollywood prestige,

a long way from the scrappy days of Iron Man. It's incredible to look around and go, I'm actually working with the best, the top of the field in every department, you know. You just go, oh my God, I'm at the top. I've sort of reached the mountaintop, at least for these next few months.

And the fact of the matter is that every aspect of putting these movies together are utilizing the best people in their field in the world. So you're really working at the highest level in every department. This is the marvel that Kevin Feige has fostered since taking full control. It's a studio that works with A-list talent and invests as much money as needed to make the comics come to life. So for me, as an actor coming in to do my part in that big machine is to deliver because

you're working with the top end of everything, you know? You can't not be impressed and buoyed by the grand scale of everything around you beforehand. The superhero genre has evolved into the most dominant in the film industry. It draws not only the best talent, but also a lot of the ticket sales. Last year, half of the top ten box office movies were either Marvel or DC adaptations. Since the success of Endgame, Feige has doubled down on going big. More characters. Bigger fights. Forget the cinematic universe.

Now we're talking about a cinematic multiverse. But Marvel's rise to the top hasn't come without scrutiny. One vocal critic is legendary film director Martin Scorsese. He says the success of superhero movies has come at a cost, and that it's hurting cinema. Here he is in 2019. The value of a film that's like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel-type pictures,

where the theaters become amusement parks, that's a different experience. And it's like, it's not even, I was saying earlier, it's not cinema, it's something else. Feige, in a podcast interview with a Hollywood reporter, pushed back on Scorsese. I think that's not true. I think it's unfortunate. I think myself and everybody that works on these movies loves cinema, loves movies, loves going to the movies, loves to watch a communal experience in a movie theater full of people. But even people who love superhero movies are starting to have concerns.

Some fans we spoke to had problems with the slew of new Marvel TV shows on the streaming service Disney+. What about all the Marvel TV shows? There's a lot of them now. Do you keep up with them all? I tried, but there's a lot. The movies are at least a little bit easier because there's a big break in between, but I haven't been able to keep up with TV shows. There's too much. I feel like right now it's just a cash grab. I feel like it's lost its magic because there's so much pumping out. You don't have time to like, you know, process what you just watched because there's another Marvel show. Superhero fatigue is kind of more or less settling in, so to speak. In 2020 when alone, there were the TV shows WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If, and Hawkeye.

And there were also the films Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, and Spider-Man No Way Home. Did your eyes glaze over? That's 34 hours of Marvel content in just one year. It's more than just an issue of quantity, though. Marvel has also had issues with quality. 2021's Eternals and this year's Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania were the first Marvel movies rated rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. That means more than 40% of critics had a negative review. Eternals was also Marvel's first theatrically released movie to lose money,

according to a person with knowledge of the studio's finances. After more than a decade of unprecedented critical and commercial success, these are signs that Marvel is starting to slip. To figure out why, I talked to two of the world's foremost experts on nerd culture. I've been a nerd for as long as I can remember. I don't think there's anybody who was cool and then became a nerd, right?

That's not how it usually works. If you're a nerd, you've been a nerd. Ooh, interesting. Yeah, I'll have to noodle on that later. That's Mallory Rubin, editor-in-chief for The Ringer. She co-hosts pop culture podcasts with another Marvel expert, Joanna Robinson. I would say specifically the X-Men were a big part of my childhood, but I didn't get all the way into the finer points of Marvel until

my 20s. And then as it became sort of the pillar of our culture and that became my profession, it became something I like to study. Mallory and Joanna know the Marvel fandom better than almost anyone. So I asked them for their opinion on superhero fatigue. I mean, I'm a glutton. I'm a glutton. I love it. But like, I think that it has become very sincerely challenging for people to maintain a tether to every new story in a way that then makes it just, that compounds, right?

It's difficult to enjoy the thing that comes next if you haven't seen the thing that came before and all of these stories build on each other in some way. I think like you shouldn't, you definitely should not feel like you have had to have seen every Disney Plus show to date and 32 MCU movies to go watch whatever's next. That's just a lot

to ask of people. Originally, the idea was well, let's make each installment must-see TV, right? You've got to see it all to understand it. And at first that was a brilliant concept to get butts in seats for like, well, I don't know that I'm interested in Thor,

but if Thor is going to be in Avengers, like I guess I'll go see Thor, et cetera. But now that it's however many movies and however many hours of television, like that becomes such a burden. Do you think this could balance out more and they'll sort of perhaps play a smaller part of our media ecosystem?

I think like, not to be too reductive about it, but I do think it just gets back to that idea of like how good are the movies and how good are the shows, you know? And like, can they land it with the hits and with the new thing they try? Am I happy that we're getting this many superhero stories? I am. I love them. It gives us stuff to talk about both professionally and personally. I like that we're getting a lot of this and meeting more characters, but it's just almost impossible to

maintain the quality that they established as essential to the MCU brand. Recently, Feige told Entertainment Weekly he plans to slow down, especially when it comes to TV shows. He said the pace will change so that each project, quote, gets a chance to shine. Some fans and Marvel insiders, who I spoke to, said they hope less content will mean higher quality. With so many movies and TV shows to oversee, they said Kevin Feige is overextended. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger recently suggested in an investor call that Marvel needs to make an adjustment. You know, do you need a sequel to typically work well for us? Do you need a third and a fourth, for instance? Or is it time to turn to other characters? There's nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand. I think we just have to look at, you know, what characters and

stories we're mining. A spokeswoman for Disney declined to comment. One thing Marvel Studios has going for it, though, is that its roster of characters is still expanding. Several years ago, Marvel struck a new deal with Sony to include Spider-Man in the MCU. And more recently, Disney acquired many of the assets of 21st Century Fox, including the film rights to two of Marvel Comics' top properties, X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

Kevin Feige can now include them both in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time. At the end of the day, inside of Marvel, like we still haven't gotten the Fantastic Four. That's coming soon, right? We still haven't gotten the X-Men. And I think that when we do, no matter how much fatigue has set in in the interim, people will be excited. And then the question will be simply, are those movies good? And if they are, if they're done well, people will be jazzed. People will arrive in droves to the theaters. People will talk about those films and those shows because surely there will be jazzed. People will arrive in droves to the theaters. People will talk about those films and those shows because surely there will be both endlessly on the internet. And we'll all be back saying, Marvel, we never doubted you for a minute.

Marvel is releasing three movies this year and four next year, with many more in the works. Despite its recent stumbles, it did have a hit this spring with the latest Guardians of the Galaxy. DC, meanwhile, struck out in June with The Flash, which is one of the last remnants of the Snyderverse. The company is in the midst of rebooting its film strategy yet again. It plans to launch a new cinematic universe. And in case you were wondering, Sony continues to cash in from their Spider-Man deal, the one struck by Ike and Avi in the 90s. The animated movie Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse was a huge hit this summer. Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse was a huge hit this summer.

I saw them all. And let's be honest, I'll probably keep seeing superhero films. Maybe with my kids. Maybe with my friends. If I have to, I'll go alone. I'll also make a point to see other movies. Original movies. In theaters.

Because if there's one thing I've learned in my years covering Hollywood, it's that while movies are culture to us, they're business to the studios. And like every business, they only give us what we demonstrate we want to buy. But I've also learned that businesses don't always move in a straight and rational line. It wasn't inevitable that superheroes would rule Hollywood and Marvel would end up in the position it is today.

What if Ike Perlmutter hadn't bought a struggling comic book company out of bankruptcy? What if Sony had bought the rights to all those Marvel characters back in the 90s? What if David Maisel had tried to raise the money for Marvel Studios just a few years later

after the economy crashed? What if Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter had found a way to work together? The entertainment business would be different. Global pop culture would be different. I don't think comic book movies are going anywhere. But I think there are going to be a lot of surprises. And I bet the story of how it happens

will continue to be at least as interesting as the action on screen. With Great Power is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Gimlet Thank you. John Sanders, and Pierre Singhi. The series is edited by Catherine Brewer and Annie Baxter. Fact-checking by Nicole Pasulka. Sound design and mixing by Griffin Tanner. The music in this episode is by Bobby Lord, Griffin Tanner, Peter Leonard, and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by So Wiley

and remixed by Nathan Singapak. Special thanks to Maher Adoni, Ariana Bow, Maria Byrne, Pia Gadkari, Kate Leinbaugh, Laura Morris, Sarah Platt,

Sarah Rabel, Ethan Smith, and Catherine Whalen. We'd also like to thank all the fans who spoke with us for this series. And thanks to the rest

of the journal team. Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knutson, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Heather Rogers, and Jeeva Kavirva. If you enjoyed With Great Power, the Journal has way more where this came from.

Follow us to catch our daily news show, plus all of our Journal series. That's The Journal on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. You're still here? The podcast is over. Go home. This isn't the MCU. It doesn't go on forever.