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MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios<\/strong>, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards<\/p>\n Hollywood doesn\u2019t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious \u2014 if not foolhardy \u2014 to open \u201cMCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios\u201d and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it\u2019s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex \u201cdidn\u2019t run forever.\u201d Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.<\/p>\n Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company\u2019s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of \u201cThe Avengers,\u201d is Hollywood\u2019s most successful movie franchise of all time \u2014 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion.<\/a> By comparison, the book points out that the \u201cStar Wars\u201d series, Marvel\u2019s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.<\/p>\n Turning the pages \u2014 which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads \u2014 one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn\u2019t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree<\/a>. Pity there\u2019s no room to examine each in depth.<\/p>\n First, the origin story. In the \u201990s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let\u2019s give him the comic book nickname \u201cThe Pennypincher\u201d), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (\u201cMCU\u201d familiarizes us with the marketing term \u201ctoyetic.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The saga of who and what changed the company\u2019s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter\u2019s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book\u2019s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy \u201cYou\u2019ve Got Mail.\u201d <\/p>\n To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now <\/strong>Marvel\u2019s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus<\/a> Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man\u2019s armored exoskeleton.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors\u2019 rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only \u201ca mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces\u201d), they wisely sense that the library\u2019s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.<\/p>\n \u201cMCU\u201d concedes that three of Marvel\u2019s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio\u2019s cornerstone creatives, the \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d director James Gunn,<\/a> decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio\u2019s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize.<\/a> Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they\u2019ll bother to follow.<\/p>\n To those seismic grumbles, I\u2019ll add another: Today\u2019s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?<\/p>\n Marvel\u2019s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for \u201cMCU\u201d; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book\u2019s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin\u2019s divorce. If you didn\u2019t understand the plot<\/a> of \u201cDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness\u201d before, they\u2019re not wasting space explaining it here.<\/p>\n Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel\u2019s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich \u2014 and an expletive \u2014 at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That\u2019s where you\u2019ll find the most inventive insults.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that \u201c50 to 75 percent\u201d of Marvel\u2019s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio\u2019s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into \u201cCaptain America: Civil War and Peace\u201d means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright\u2019s \u201cAnt-Man\u201d<\/a> and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.<\/p>\n After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.<\/p>\n MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios<\/strong> | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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