Marvel Cinematic Universe: Origins and Future

In this podcast, Motley Fool host Mary Long caught up with Dave Gonzales, co-author of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, to discuss topics including:

• Why making superhero movies wasn't always an obvious decision.
• The success, and future problems, created by Iron Man.
• How the pandemic changed Marvel.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Dec. 17, 2023.

Dave Gonzales: You don't have a comic book guy at the head of it. You have Kevin Feige who's like he would watch Star Trek V and then go home and think about what he would want Star Trek VI to be to fix the Star Trek V. He wants you to have a good movie at the end of the day. All the armchair quarterback solution seems to be just make good movies, and if there's one person that I feel could just use that advice and be, like, yeah, I'll just make good movie, it's Kevin Feige.

Mary Long: I'm Mary Long, and that's Dave Gonzalez, a podcaster, culture reporter, and a co-author of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios. We caught up in person at our Denver podcast studio for a conversation about the origins of the Marvel cinematic universe and what foreshadowed its current challenges, why superhero movies originally weren't an obvious play, and the one thing that can't scale, even with an unlimited budget. I want to talk about how Marvel lost its sheen, but I think maybe the best way to get there is to start at the beginning.

Dave Gonzales: Absolutely.

Mary Long: Before we start at the beginning, let's talk about the characters that are going to come into play because I found through reading your book, there are real people that are behind the Marvel movies and that drive it. Understanding who they are and what makes them tick is really essential to understanding what drives Marvel. There's a ton of people that you talk about in your book. If you had to hone in on 3-5, who are the big characters that are essential to understanding the story of Marvel?

Dave Gonzales: So I'd like to really start with Isaac Perlmutter, who I will be calling Ike from here on out. We don't know each other, but that's just how I'd like to refer to him, and Avi Arad, who I have had the chance to meet and hang out with on several occasions covering Marvel movies. In the early '90s, they were part of a company called Toy Biz that basically designed action figures. Ike Perlmutter is really good at being 1980s corporate raider, so he would buy up companies and product and disassemble them and move them around. Toy Biz was the first company that he felt really sticking with, and I think that's because, at some point, they inherited the Batman action figure license around 1989's Batman, so they were able to see big toy money coming out of movies and thought that maybe these superhero toys could maybe do something. They were able to negotiate a pretty amazing deal to have a limitless license with Marvel in exchange for a portion of the company and some control, some board seats that they gave to Ron Perlman. So there's going to be a Perlmutter and a Perlman, but we'll all try to keep them separate. Perlman was somebody who had bought up Marvel Studios, thinking that it was potentially a mini Disney.

He realized the purpose of all the different characters and how that could create different product, but he was always very product-forward, and so in the '80s, Lucasfilm tried to do Howard the Duck. That's the first big Marvel movie, and it didn't do well, and so what Perlman learned from that was there's much more cachet in making Marvel product, in having a movie in development, but not necessarily releasing a movie, so all of the late '80s, early '90s attempts at Marvel movies were adaptations of the Incredible Hulk TV show or low-budget Captain Americas, where he has a motorcycle helmet on and is masked the whole time. This really went up against somebody like Avi Arad who was put in charge of developing toys for the X-Men series. Avi always liked the X-Men as characters because he says that he identifies with a mutant, and he really is a weird dude. He's a leather jacket-wearing toy executive, who just has a mind for what toy products were going to hit big on the market. Once he realized that X-Men were going to be able to sell, he was, like, we need to push this in some product. As the '80s taught toy developers the best way to do that sometimes is as a cartoon, so he partnered with Fox Kids to make the X-Men Animated Series that eventually grew to the Spider-Man animated series. All of those things pushed toy products to an incredible degree, but Avi always wanted to push further into movies, despite where the company was going. So he was always on 20th Century Fox to get the X-Men into theaters.

They were able to put some X-Men Animated Series shows in prime time as a market test, and they did well. That's where the deal began to create the X-Men movies that we will eventually know about. Once that proved to be profitable, Avi was allowed to create the first Marvel Studios in name only, but that Studios job was more packaging and licensing. They would try to get an interested director together and then maybe try to sell a script or a project with a director and actor to a studio and then let those movies develop, which would have been great. We would have gotten a lot more Marvel movies in the late '90s, if the company itself under Perlman didn't crash.

He made some interesting business decisions. He used a lot of the profits from Marvel to buy up Fleer, the baseball card company, right as there was a strike going on, which was a weird decision. That didn't pan out. He also bought, I believe, an Italian sticker company to disassemble for parts but, essentially, used all these acquisitions to create junk bonds, and a lot of that went through Marvel, devaluing Marvel to the point that they had to declare bankruptcy. Then it became a cage match between a bunch of different entities, and Ike Perlmutter was not about to give up his board seat on Toy Biz. That was like his baby. So eventually in 1998, they emerged from bankruptcy with Toy Biz absorbing Marvel and becoming Marvel Entertainment which would eventually lead to the movies.

Mary Long: A lot of those early attempts at Marvel movies, that's not like the Marvel Studios that we know today. It's this early iteration. How do we go from that first Marvel Studios to then the Marvel Studios that we now associate with the MCU?

Dave Gonzales: I think they were really bolstered by the fact that they came out of bankruptcy to find that Blade, a movie that they had sold for maybe 25 grand the rights to, actually was doing well. I like to remind people always that Marvel movies really kicked off with Black Vampire Hunter played by Wesley Snipes. Then after that, a series of things happened. 20th Century Fox was finally free to do an X-Men movie. They found Bryan Singer, and he's way into it through producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who at that point was working with assistant Kevin Feige because this all starts to weave together.

Mary Long: That's the name to remember. [laughs]

Dave Gonzales: It's like a dame to remember. They found Bryan Singer who was, like, ''I don't want to treat this like a comic book property. I want to tell my own story using these characters in this world,'' and Marvel was on board. X-Men is one of their most popular properties. It's always been an IP they could use to talk about various inequalities, and Bryan Singer was going to develop that into a more human story. Sometimes that meant taking a step away from the comics inspiration. That's why you don't have Wolverine in his classic yellow, and they make fun of some of the comic book origins of those heroes. When the movie came out, because 20th Century Fox was taking a risk, they moved the release date around a little bit, and that really frustrated Ike Perlmutter and Marvel Entertainment because it takes nine months. It's basically like making a baby to make a product line. If you shift a release date, and you don't have product ready, or if it's a more mature movie than they were expecting, which it was, you maybe don't have the correct product lined up. Ike Perlmutter would tell you they lost a lot of money on X-Men even though it was a hit.

The next one was they had to untangle the Spider-Man, which is a whole different story that many people have written books and essays about, but when it was eventually untangled, and Spider-Man once again could become a movie, and Sony had the rights to it, they made Spider-Man, and Spider-Man was a gigantic hit in 2002. Ike Perlmutter is, like, we get 20% of the box office, so even for Marvel's biggest hits in 2000 and 2002, they weren't seeing as much of a return as they wanted, and a lot of the returns they would get were still product-based. The big pivot happens in 2004 when a movie executive named David Maisel watches the Ben Affleck Daredevil, and he's, like, surely they could do better than this from a story standpoint. He researches the Marvel deal on how their licensing is going on, and he gets through his contacts, meeting with Ike Perlmutter in Mar-a-Lago.

Trump definitely stopped by to say hi because Ike Perlmutter and Trump are really close, and David Maisel's pitch was you should form your own studio because then all the money comes back to you. You aren't just licensing out your characters, but you get to recoup more at the box office. You get to make more of the calls about creatively what's going on. You're not just lending your baby to somebody else and hoping it works out. Ike Perlmutter, very interested in that idea because it means more money but also a very shrewd businessman, so he's, like, come back to me with a way to create my own studio without putting any money down, and that's what starts the David Maisel-Marvel Studios era with an amazing business deal that he works at with Merrill Lynch.

Mary Long: I feel today you hear that pitch and idea, and you think, why didn't anyone think of that earlier? That was not how things were done.

Dave Gonzales: Right. Not at all.

Mary Long: It's just so essential to hit on the fact that that was a really novel concept., even though where we're sitting today, it's, of course, why hadn't anyone thought of that before?

Dave Gonzales: Especially not from a comic book company. It was a really weird place for a movie studio to be coming out of. If you didn't have any legacy movie people really at Marvel, except Avi Arad, who had been a producer on basically these licensing deals. He would be a steward of the character and help people understand "the comic book character," but it wasn't like he was a producer who had a lot of experience fund-raising or anything about the business of making film, which is where David Maisel stepped in and had to concoct this deal where ultimately what happened is he ended up mortgaging a whole bunch of Marvel characters, like Captain America, like Black Panther, like Shang-Chi, to Merrill Lynch.

The movie rights to those characters in exchange for over $500 million, and the thought was Marvel would produce four different movies ranging in budget from $100-150 million, and through the profits of those movies would pay back the loan. The thing that ended up being the brilliant business thing, and the reason I always credit David Maisel, because a lot of times people forget his name, is in order to set up this deal, he had to simultaneously convince the Marvel board that these properties were worth losing, while turning around and convincing the banks that they were worth the money that he was asking for. He had to ride both of those lines with very smart businessmen on both sides, basically, say it's OK if we lose Captain America, and there's a Merrill Lynch Captain America movie, and then turn around and be, like, no, Captain America is our most valuable property. We're giving this to you because we're basically giving the whole company to you. It's amazing that that got pulled off.

There were some times that David Maisel says they would try to switch the terms at the very end, and he would just refuse to leave the conference room until a deal was met, and it ended up working out. Not exactly one-to-one mortgage, he did have to pre-sell some rights to Iron Man in terms of foreign properties. That's very widely done with movies anyway, so he didn't do much out of the box outside of this gigantic IP mortgaging. That luckily ended up working out. Iron Man came out, and they were able to pay back the loan at one at bat. Then that led the next steps to Disney but also opened up Marvel Studios because, while David was doing the business thing, he realized he needed somebody doing quality control, and that's where Kevin Feige came in. He was a assistant for Lauren Shuler Donner, the producer on the X-Men movies. Basically she was busy running her producing empire. Kevin Feige was the person who was on set everyday and would call back at the end of the day or at the end of the week and give full reports. Because of that, he was also making himself an expert in the comics. Kevin Feige is a movie guy more than he's a comic book guy, so he's interested in making good movies and making good movies that make money. He taught himself everything he learned about the Marvel universe, starting with X-Men. He read a whole bunch of X-Men comics. Bryan Singer was, like, this isn't the story we're telling. He actually banned X-Men comics from the set, but Kevin Feige would bring some Wolverine-centric issues and slide it under Hugh Jackman's door and that sort of thing, realizing that you could do both. You could make a good movie that is going to be profitable, but also the answers to a lot of the sticky questions are actually in the comics.

Mary Long: They did that arguably with Iron Man. That movie, again, just feels so iconic, not just because it's the first but also in what it's doing with this stigmatized superhero genre a little bit and how it's playing with that. What made Iron Man so appealing to Marvel fans, but also to the layman that was less familiar with comics?

Dave Gonzales: They picked Iron Man specifically as a more layman property, very specifically, once again, the toy property, because that's how Marvel really understood things at the beginning at the turn of the century. They did a whole bunch of play tests with kids being, of these heroes, which one would you like to see a movie with, and they're, like, we want to see a movie with the flying robot that shoots lasers out of his hands. At the time, the Tony Stark character in the comics, his probably most famous run was about him being an alcoholic, and then he's also an avenger that bops in out of stories but not necessarily the most family friendly four quadrant-character to go with. Nobody really knew who he was, so that gave Jon Favreau a blank slate once he came in to direct.

Jon Favreau came in wanting to direct more of a comedy, like a man out of place movie for Captain America that would have been a lighter than the eventual Captain America: The First Avenger. Basically Kevin Feige saw Elf and was like, this guy can do [LAUGHTER] fish out of water, and why wouldn't we want him to do Marvel? Then when it pivoted to Iron Man, Jon Favreau's big point was everything has to be plausible in the real world. We're not going to do a rubbery superhero who's bending physics. It's we have to set up why this happens and saw the plausibility of it, and that connected with a post 911 America. It's like, why don't we lift him out of his original Vietnam story line and put him manufacturing weapons in the Middle East. They were able to put together this script that seemed really great. Then they hired Robert Downey, Jr., and then they got to set, and they threw the script out everyday. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr., and Jeff Bridges, and to a certain extent, Gwyneth Paltrow, but she hasn't actually liked to do that. Would just sit in a trailer and talk about what scene they were doing, what it meant, and a lot of that led to the humor that was in Iron Man and the Robert Downey, Jr. flow where it feels improvisational even though you can't really tell.

Those things became the hallmarks of a Marvel movie. After that, an Incredible Hulk came out. They had a company retreat to figure out how to do the next run of movies. They went and they watched Iron Man. They're, like, why does this work better than the Incredible Hulk? It has more humor, and it has humor that arrives organically through the characters, and so they decided this is what template for Marvel movie is going to be. It's going to start with plausibility. Let the characters run and bounce humor off of the incidents that happen actually in the movie. You could feel that Iron Man was like this basically Marvel Studios flying without a template, and because of that, a lot of people who worked on that movie talked about it more as having an independent film vibe because Marvel Entertainment, the businessmen out East, were not interfering at all. Marvel Studios, otherwise, was trying to figure out how it was going to operate.

Because it struck gold the first time out, they're like, how could we lock in this method to the best possible degree? I think, because of that, there's a lot of strengths from Marvel that come from that first production, but you also have a lot of the tensions that are now breaking Marvel coming from that first production. Iron Man was in post production at the beginning of right another writers' strike back in the late 2000s, and they realized that their Act 3 wasn't working. It was Iron Man and Jeff Bridges in the Iron Monger suit punching each other. Someone said it felt really Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, almost too plausible plausibility. [LAUGHTER] Jon Favreau went back to the writers and was, like, hey, is there a way we can solve this? They were, like, we have two weeks where we have to do pencils down, so they're, like, figure out a way to solve it in two weeks.

The writers took about a week to make a scene where Tony Stark takes Obadiah Stane up into the air because his suit doesn't have a defroster because he didn't build the tech. He inherited the tech. They're, like, that's a story reason to get it done. Even better, that is something that we could create entirely from ILM because they already had the sky plates from Iron Man's earlier flight, and really all it took was replacing characters and having Robert Downey, Jr. and Jeff Bridges come in and do some face stuff to line everything up. They created a new third act for Iron Man, mostly out of CG effects, and as the film was being edited together, that created this idea that the best idea should win at Marvel, which is great if you're doing one or two movies a year. It gets harder when you're doing three movies a year, and three Disney+ shows a year, and all of those things have to work through visual effects pipeline. It makes the best movie if you're allowed to change things up until the very end, but that's not scalable, just like Kevin Feige as a person isn't scalable.

Mary Long: To talk about Disney for a bit, it's sometimes wild for me to remember that that Disney Acquisition happened in 2009 because today I think a lot of people are prone to float questions of, is Disney ruining Marvel? But you go back to a story like you just told, and that's, what, 2015 when that's happening, and Marvel is thanking God for Bob Iger and his emphasis on creatives and him stepping in and really giving Kevin Feige the reins. It's wild to step in a multiverse version of that and imagine what would have happened if Bob Chapek had been CEO at that point.

Dave Gonzales: It would be really interesting to figure out just what would happen if Bob Chapek got to make more of his own decisions because the thing that stymied Marvel during that time period, actually, and all the Disney sub-brands is Chapek takes over a couple of weeks before COVID hits, so all of Disney's big money-making properties which are its cruises, which are its parks, basically its experiences, whether they'd be hotel or the Beauty and the Beast musical, all of those get shut down, and so what he is left with on the creative content side is this big push that actually Bob Iger put into place before he left, which is let's get subscribers on Disney+. Iger was very bullish about creating Disney+ off of some cool code that he inherited from ESPN and being able to create this streaming empire.

At the time in 2018, 2019, it looked like the streaming wars were going to be the be-all/end-all of entertainment. He was like we're going to make sure that all of our flagship brands have a presence on Disney+. Pixar is going to be on Disney+. They had Kathleen Kennedy over at Lucasfilm announce a whole bunch of projects, a lot of which we still haven't seen yet because I don't think a lot of them are ready to go, and we see that with Marvel too, where they're encouraged to, at best, forced to, at worst, announce a whole bunch of projects that they didn't know for sure if they were going to end up doing, like, are we ever going to see Armor Wars? I still don't know. It was a weird plan to begin with, but it was about flooding the streaming space with all these trustable brands, and you would know what those things were going to be. I think it worked partially because the pandemic gave them a forced year off too. It's much easier to do "best idea wins," if you have three months to figure out what the best idea is, and they were able to work around what their streaming properties were going to be, so when WandaVision kicks off in 2021, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, spoilers, he becomes Captain America.

Mary Long: [laughs]

Dave Gonzales: All of those felt fresh, and they felt interesting, Lucasfilm was able to capitalize on The Mandalorian but keeping those things updated, and this idea that began with Iger and Chapek pushed really hard, like the sun never sets on the Marvel Empire. You're going to have a Disney+ show, you're going to have a movie, but then the pandemic hits and disrupts that entire plan, and so they have to start slotting things in wherever they can, which caused a lot of problems for the company, not just Disney but Marvel Studios and all of the Disney sub-brands, I think, especially after the pandemic when they shortened the release window, so it was maybe 60 days between when something came out in theaters, and you'd be able to stream it on Disney+. That really hurt Pixar, that really hurt Disney Animation, and it maybe hurt Marvel. Marvel did a pretty good job of being like, no, all these things are connected. WandaVision is going to lead right into Dr. Strange, so that would keep people watching things as soon as possible basically for fear of being spoiled, but then once it became so much, once it became so many Disney+ shows and so many movies and none of them had the Avengers title, which seems to be the flag that says you actually have to see it. I think that Fandom was, like, this is too much for me. I will wait and catch up with it when I have time, and sometimes they just don't return to that product.

Mary Long: If you have a fan say that, that really tells you that there's a problem. I think part of the magic of Marvel and the intrigue of Marvel storytelling is that I, as someone who's admittedly not a super fan, could, especially in the early days, watch a movie, and without having any background on Iron Man or Captain America, I was intrigued. I knew what was happening and appreciated little hints at interconnectedness between the movies. Now again, as someone who's not a super fan, I'm not sitting down and watching all of these Disney+ TV shows that are coming out. Yes, you flood the market, and you maybe play to this idea of you have to watch it now or else it will be spoiled, but you flood it too much, and you create this problem for yourself, or you're building niches, where previously you had everyone interested.

Dave Gonzales: Right. It's hard to recapture after Endgame because Endgame was such a moment for everybody, where they brought in a larger audience because it was like here's a team up of all your heroes, and Endgame worked pretty well together with Infinity War at providing arcs for those heroes within those two movies. If you wanted to know more about Thor, oh boy, there was a whole bunch of movies you could watch. Now it feels like people will ask, like, what movies do I have to watch to understand Black Panther: Wakanda Forever? There's different answers to that, man, because there's lots of characters that intersect now, and some people who are just casual Marvel fans but would maybe be interested in being deeper Marvel fans hit that homework barrier, which is the side effect to being so successful with making every movie a sequel.

Once you're at the top of the pile in terms of that type of film making, once you're the only studio that's made a cinematic universe that makes sense and sustains, what are the cracks that show in that? The cracks are some people won't watch She-Hulk because they think they need to understand The Hulk, or some people won't watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier because both of those characters are from other Captain America movies, and they've tuned out at that point because Cap's gone. The good thing is, as Kevin Feige said at the very beginning, when doing X-Men the solutions are in the comics. In terms of doing serialized storytelling, Marvel has half-a-century worth of history about how to do these things that are essentially product-testing. I hope that they could find a way through it, but business-wise, flooding the Disney+ space and increasing output without finding a way to scale up Kevin Feige as the person capable of the alchemy has hurt them. But in a way that I see that also happening with Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy and Pixar and Pete Docter is, those people all rose to the top of their positions in an environment that is now completely different in terms of what people are watching and whether or not they're going to the movie theater for it.

Mary Long: Marvel's latest release, The Marvels, came out in early November and is considered a flop. In the opening weekend, it made $47 million. I think, all year, you've had people talking about, is this the end of the superhero era? Is this the end of the Marvel era? What do you think?

Dave Gonzales: It's tough. I definitely agree with the flop terminology, just as somebody who's followed box office for a long period of time, but it's also hard to tell when you put it up against other things people have caused to flop, when you make a graph with Marvel earnings versus something like Blue Beetle, which is I thought also a fun film, but it has performed worse for Warner Bros. and DC, so it's hard to tell. I think you're always going to have a time where the shine came off the brand a little bit. The thing that's very encouraging to me is everybody's having a tough time at the box office. We're, I think, seeing a little bit more IP fatigue than we're seeing specifically superhero fatigue. Something like the Marvels is really interesting because, even though it didn't open as well as other Marvel movies, it's still one of, if not the highest opening from a black female director, who's Nia DaCosta, opened it. It had a couple of things where it had to be the best in order to even be passing, or something like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which came out earlier this year, and everybody basically also considers it being lackluster and not critically received well, but it's also still in the top 10 box office grosses of this year.

How bad did it do really? It's interesting to see with all of Disney right now, that if I were going to trust somebody to dig themselves out of their own hole, it would be Marvel Studios. They've pushed a lot of their releases from 2024 to 2025, with the exception of Deadpool 3, which won't be the title, but we'll call it Deadpool 3, and that's also going to be the first R-Rated MCU film that's wide-release, so there's one big risk next year, but they're excited about it, and they hope that people will get excited about it to the point that, when Marvel gets back to doing three movies a year, there's a bit more appetite for it. That's also going to allow them to repivot, and hopefully focus a little bit more on the quality of the stories. Plus the WGA strike, the winnings that they were able to pull off there requires there be a show runner and an onset writer for their Disney+ series, which is why they rebooted Daredevil, the streaming series, even though they'd shot either a quarter to a half of it, depending on who you talk to.

Then they shot a little bit of a series called Wonder Man that they're going to retool slightly. What they learned trying to produce television during the Marvel Studios method is that doesn't really work. You can't let Robert Downey, Jr. make your TV series moment to moment, TV doesn't really work that way. Now they're going to need to have a show runner with a show bible, and then an onset writer to help people navigate everything, which is much more, instead of being a disruptor in the TV space like they were trying to be with things like WandaVision and Loki Season 1. Now they're going to have to play by the TV rules, which I think is great. There's a reason television works so consistently across the 20th century. It's because we built these rules in order to have fun serialized storytelling.

I'm hoping both those things could recenter, it's a lot harder if I'm looking at Disney sub-brands to think about how the parks rebound, or how Disney Animation rebounds from Wish, or how Pixar rebounds from people just waiting to see it on Disney+ and therefore not seeing in the theaters. I was very happy that Elemental had the legs this year to overcome a flopping opening weekend and go back into profitability, but it's very hard to see how Disney moves forward with a whole bunch of its flagship brands, basically, not performing the way that they need them to.

Mary Long: You make a good point. I don't know that I would bet against Marvel and Kevin Feige either. At the end of the day, we're still talking about a hugely successful franchise that, across 33 films, has grossed over $30 billion. It's easy to pile on and say, oh, they're meeting their demise. I don't know, we could sit tight, and wait, see, it's like sometimes it's hard to be top dog.

Dave Gonzales: As somebody who's been following it since the beginning, I heard a lot of stuff after Avengers: Age of Ultron than I'm hearing now, which not necessarily the box office was great for that, but people were being, like, it's too complex. It doesn't have an ending, like, in Marvel Studios is over, and I'm, like, they can absolutely repivot because, again, you don't have a comic book guy at the head of it. You have Kevin Feige, who's like he would watch Star Trek V and then go home and think about what he would want Star Trek VI to be to fix the Star Trek V. He wants you to have a good movie at the end of the day, and all the armchair quarterback solution seems to be just make good movies, and if there's one person that I feel like could just use that advice and be like, yeah, OK, I'll just make good movies, it's Kevin Feige. I have high hopes for the rebound in terms of the creative forces there.

As long as he sticks around, there's two things that would spell the death of the Marvel brand in my mind right now. One is the sudden departure of Kevin Feige because there's a lot of very talented people who form what they call the Marvel Parliament, which is like the second layer of producers that are able to shepherd projects through, but none of them have, I think, the track record to do what Kevin Feige has been doing. Also a lot of them are so hyper focused on their movies, as they should be. That it would be interesting to see what happens if you elevated them to the decision-making level that Kevin Feige needs to be at, or if they release an Avengers movie that bombs because that's their core brand, that's the brand you have to show up for. That's what we all learned in 2012 is you show up for an Avengers movie, and those are the culmination movies, so whether or not you've been watching what came before or what came after, an Avengers movie has to live and die by its own runtime, and so when an Avengers movie comes out and bombs, then their options on how to move forward become increasingly limited, and it's going to be difficult to regain the dominance that they had.

Mary Long: Regardless of what happens with Marvel moving forward, you have Warner Bros. DC. They've tried to build their own superhero extended universe with varying degrees of success. This summer when Barbie's coming out, and people are talking about the Mattel cinematic universe, whether it's Mattel or something unseen or it's Warner Bros. in DC, do you have your eyes on another company, be it a studio or an IP empire, that you think could genuinely replicate the success that Marvel's seen?

Dave Gonzales: I don't know. That's tough. I would say, with the pause that we've had in Star Wars, it's hard to count Star Wars out, but I'm trying to think about things outside of Disney. I think what Sony is attempting to do with its Spider-Man universe is interesting. We're going to get a couple of non Spider-Man character movies this next upcoming year. We're going to get Kraven, and we're going to get Madame Web, and then Venom 3. That idea that that could be building to something, that Sony has been trying to do with Sinister Six movie since 2010, so the idea that they could band those together, but it's tough because the thing that made the Marvel cinematic universe was not only good film production and good business sense, but it hit at the exact right time. We have a chapter in our book that is the Iron Man 3 chapter, but what it really is is China's movie-going population explodes.

They go from a couple hundred million a year to like billions a year in terms of the box office that comes out of China, and China at that point was not very open. They were just beginning to let American productions into China at a more regular pace, whereas previously they had been, like, you would have a delay from the worldwide release, and you could only release in certain months because they had reserved certain months to be for Chinese local cinema only. Then once these Marvel movies come in, and they're big, and they're flashy, and they're with the exception of Iron Man, making missiles fluff, they managed to really capitalize on that in a way that we've now seen China ramp down. Chinese national cinema has been improving, and their box office in China has been improving, and so they don't have the need necessarily to import a blockbuster anymore, which has made them and in several other countries get a little more specific about what they want to see in Marvel movies.

A lot of times movies won't open in the Middle East because it features same-sex relationship or something like that, and that's going to ultimately hurt a fraction of the international box office, but there was a time period in between 2012 and 2016, where the international box office was exceeding the domestic box office by such a degree because China was basically letting the movies come in, and they were gigantic hits there. Now that the film landscape has changed, both because of that and because of post pandemic theatrical habits, if I knew how to replicate it, I would, and I would be an executive somewhere because [laughs] I think there is a certain amount of right time, right place, right idea that allowed the MCU to do what it did, and also because of that, I don't think even the MCU knows how to replicate that.

Mary Long: Dave Gonzalez, thanks so much for your time. It's been awesome talking with you. Your book, which you wrote with two other authors, Joanna Robinson and Gavin Edwards, is called MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios. It is a fantastic book regardless of whether you are a Marvel super fan or not. It talks about how things get made in Hollywood and is a great entertainment history of the past couple decades. Thanks so much. Great to have you on.

Dave Gonzales: Thank you. It was great talking to you.

Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.