The Marvel Studios Phenomenon

Inside a Transmedia Universe

Martin Flanagan, Andrew Livingstone, Mike McKenny

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501311864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Marvel Studios has provided some of the biggest worldwide cinematic hits of the last eight years, from Iron Man (2008) to the record-breaking The Avengers (2012), and beyond. Having announced plans to extend its production of connected texts in cinema, network and online television until at least 2028, the new aesthetic patterns brought about by Marvel's 'shared' media universe demand analysis and understanding. The Marvel Studios Phenomenon evaluates the studio's identity, as well as its status within the structures of parent Disney. In a new set of readings of key texts such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the thematics of superhero fiction and the role of fandom are considered. The authors identify milestones from Marvel's complex and controversial business history, allowing us to appraise its industrial status: from a comic publisher keen to exploit its intellectual property, to an independent producer, to successful subsidiary of a vast entertainment empire.

Chapter 1

‘Films Lead Policy’: Marvel’s Industrial (R)evolution and the Birth of a Studio

Introduction

In June 2015, sweeping changes were coming to the comics of the MU, designed to hit over the summer. To prepare fans, Marvel released a free preview detailing several of the ‘All-New, All-Different’ titles that would establish the characters’ new status quo. EIC Axel Alonso welcomed readers to this new phase with a message:

What was your first encounter with the Marvel Universe? Did you pull a comic book off a spinner rack at the five and dime like I did, or did you float out of a movie theater, your mind blown by what you saw on the Silver Screen [?] … If you liked that feeling, you’re going to love what’s in store for you in All-New, All-Different Marvel.

(Alonso, 2015a: 4)

Statements from the management of MS intimate that the masterplan controlling all of Marvel’s joined-up entertainment activity radiates from its filmic output (according to former executive Justin Lambros, speaking about the relationship between the videogames outlying Marvel’s convergence circle, and the film releases at its heart, associated products were meant to ‘take the lead from the films’, and even material sourced in comics would be ‘filtered’ through this matrix – Lambros, cited in Johnson, 2013: 97–8). If the direction of the MCU is creatively led by films, Alonso’s statement seemed to do more than offer helpful contextualization; it seemed to admit something new. This was the fact that from this point, new Marvel comics would similarly take a lead from the needs of, and the character iterations appearing in, the MCU. Implicitly accepted in the statement was the idea that quarters of comic-reading fandom – the spinner rack-lurkers who may see themselves as having stood by Marvel Comics through long, frequently lean times – might not be happy, but Alonso attempted to remind them of the bond they shared with recent converts (What difference where a ‘true believer’ discovers their interest?).

This indivisibility of publishing and filmic aims would now, it seemed, dictate events within the pages of comics that, prior to this ‘subordination’ (Johnson, 2013: 98), had seemed to represent the purest level of Marvel characters’ authenticity and existence. After all, Alonso had presided over a year in comics where Phil Coulson, an MCU invention, had materialized leading a S.H.I.E.L.D. team and linking with the already resident Quake/Daisy Johnson/Skye (familiar to television viewers from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – see Chapters 5 and 8); a half-century before (calibrated to the passing of time in mainstream Marvel continuity), Agent Peggy Carter, another TV star, had been shown to have adventured alongside the father of Tony Stark/Iron Man in the 1950s.1 Characters were converging and completing a ‘feedback loop’ – from comics to films, back to comics. The versions played by Hayley Atwell (Carter) and Chloe Bennet (Daisy/Skye), with which millions of cinema and TV viewers were familiar, were the new yardstick for how those characters should appear in the MU. The implication was that things happening in Marvel comics should not contradict what is going on in the MCU, and the shape that the new status quo was taking would precisely accommodate this.

Around eight months before Alonso’s introduction to ‘All-New’ Marvel Comics, Kevin Feige announced the ‘Phase Three’ MCU titles at a pumped-up press event in a Hollywood theatre. This event laid out two decades’ worth of connected production: the MS slate stretching on towards 2028, comprising a total run of twenty-one features. The day confirmed the completion of a remarkable turnaround of Marvel, the business.2 A troubled comic publishing company had not only ‘planted [its] flags’, as Feige put it, into the new billion-dollar territory of filmed entertainment – it had shown, via the currency of success, that it belonged there. It is the right time to reconsider the meaning of certain steps of this transition in detail. As this work proceeds, the motives and mechanics of Marvel’s history of attempts to become a film and television industry player, and the recipe for its recent success and stability, will be given their due. In the present chapter, we view the pattern as a whole. Our assessment will be framed via a few key questions:

● What is a studio? How does one operate? Can periods in the history of American cinema be differentiated by distinct ways of operating?

● Can the models of past Hollywood production cultures put forward by Film Studies tell us anything about Marvel’s status and position in global film entertainment today?

● When it acquired its capital and struck out into production, was Marvel Studios ‘independent’? What do we mean by saying that it was?

● What is the place held by Marvel Studios and its plans within the Disney empire?

Before we do this, it would help to highlight the roles and identities of key personnel that currently give, or in the past have given MS its shape and structure. We will discuss the concept of ‘studio authorship’ later on, but clearly, individuals and management structures above and around creative personnel, casts and crews, constitute a large part of the studio’s business, and help to foster its values and identity.

MS grew out of Marvel Films in 1996, but owes its current status and shape to significant changes in the mid-2000s. Prior to this, headed by Avi Arad, the company was a pre-production hub, exposing Marvel characters through licensing deals with studios such as Fox, Sony and Lionsgate. One such deal brought Feige into the fold (working with Arad as executive producer on Fox’s X-Men); he officially took the position of Arad’s second-in-command in 2000 (Anon., 2009a). As will be detailed in Chapter 2, both Feige and Arad took a creative producing approach, but the appointment – that of David Maisel – that changed the MS trajectory was, tellingly, more commercial in nature (closer to the heart of Arad’s business partner – and Marvel purse-string holder – Ike Perlmutter, who has presided over the organization since it emerged from bankruptcy). Maisel joined as MS President and Chief Operating Officer in 2004 (Anon., 2004a) and is credited with pushing the organization into the arena of (then) independent production for which it is now recognized (Maisel it was, who secured the $525 million required to sponsor this production). As a result, in 2005, Maisel was promoted to MS Vice Chairman, and Executive Vice President – Corporate Development in the wider Marvel Entertainment. Installed in this role, with film production on a continuous footing, he is credited with brokering the 2009 deal between Marvel and Disney, following which he left the company (Anon., 2009b). Amid Maisel’s rise within the company, Arad departed in 2006, reportedly over creative differences between the two (Leonard, 2007), an account later disputed by Arad (Busch, 2014).

Since Maisel’s exit, still under the oversight of the (by reputation) austere Perlmutter, studio business revolves around three individuals, each with some creative urgency and identity: President of Production, Kevin Feige; Co-President (since 2009), Louis D’Esposito, who was formerly President of Physical Effects; and Executive VP of Visual Effects and Post-Production, Victoria Alonso (DeMott, 2009). The three executives, around whom a core team is often maintained from production to production (Masters, 2014), imbue the governance of MS with a front that stresses a creative interest and leadership kept in balance with executive responsibility (see Chapter 2). Alonso, for instance, expounds a collaboratively creative approach encapsulated in the ‘Marvel Process’ – the subject of a keynote she delivered at 2014’s Visual Effects Society Production Summit (Giardina, 2014) – but maintains the fiscal discipline instilled in the company by Perlmutter by ensuring that production is undertaken efficiently (Cohen, 2015). Placing a constant and stable team, with a shared background in various elements of creative producing,3 at the heart of how productions are assembled on the studio side mirrors, but also enables, the more directly influential combinations of directors, writers and crew (although here we should take care to not always take the filmmakers’ and studio’s word at face value, as is explored later). Significant to the expansion of Marvel’s game-changing MCU, Marvel Television was established in 2010, following the Disney sale, after which its operation was moved to the Disney-owned ABC studios (Andreeva, 2012). Here, Jeph Loeb takes a Feige-like position in overseeing television content, which increasingly features in the world-building transmedia enterprise of the MCU (see Chapter 8). The direction of both divisions, still under the auspices of Marvel Entertainment and the control of Perlmutter, is monitored by the MCC.4 Up to late 2015, the MCC’s remit appeared to have straddled both film and television operations, but Tilly (2015) as well as Masters and Belloni (2015) provide accounts that suggest more fluidity to this situation.

What do we talk about when we talk about Marvel Studios?

The period when the ‘Studio System’ – a specific organizational way of structuring business that drew together the largest, most successful and recognizable entities of Hollywood cinema – held sway varies according to the observer.5 Most accounts will extend as early as the late 1920s and as late as 1960. The Studio System is a device for describing how economic arrangements were laid out; the product that resulted, and its particular aesthetics, is better described with reference to notions of ‘classical cinema’. Taken together, they capture the idea of a factory-like system geared up to make a standardized, effective product to the pleasure of audiences. Aspects including script, mise-en-scène (the meaningful contents of the film frame), casting and so on had principles of formula applied to them (the genre system; the star system) so that what worked could be repeated. The parts of the company selling the film knew how to sell: stars and genre (and even, more rarely, the director or producer) would be used so that audiences could relate new films to previous successes, often coalescing around a notion that identified the releasing studio with preferred genres or the striving for a particular atmosphere (glamour, realism, classiness, etc.). Control over the most crucial parts of the process – producing the film, distributing into theatres, and making sure the end result had the best chance to sell tickets – was kept within the company in the case of the largest studios like Paramount, Fox and Warner Bros., which owned theatre chains; the coordination of these three stages was known as ‘vertical integration’. The model was one of mass production, informed by principles of ‘Fordism’, and it addressed audiences as an ‘undifferentiated mass market’ which was ‘served … [with] a limited array of standardized mass-produced commodities’ (Smith, 1998: 6).6

Film Studies looks beyond the pure economic description to approach the ‘Studio System’ era in terms of a particular relation between system and creativity (the classical cinema). The era’s values and how the studios functioned is delineated in fascinating detail in studies such as those of Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (1991), and Schatz (1998), and every subsequent study of Hollywood – even ones taking up the story decades after the apparent end of this phase – build on such works. What does Film Studies identify as the typical features of a company that extends, in relevance, from the classical into the contemporary (‘post-classical’) era?7 Looking a little more deeply, how has the notion of the studio been broken down?

We might take the case of Disney, Marvel’s current corporate parent, as elucidated by Janet Wasko (2001). Over a brief few pages, Wasko underscores various points of importance in the process by which Disney eventually became the most emulatable of all those media brands still retaining a core interest in theatrical film (Grainge, 2008: 49). Wasko follows the studio from its unlikely start in 1923, beginning as a privately owned production outfit releasing through a de facto ‘Big Five’ studio in RKO8 (until RKO’s financial instability in the early 1950s persuaded Disney to form its own subsidiary for distribution), and into the modern era of conglomeration. Wasko notes the features and policies that made it so fit for this era, among which are its capacity to ride waves of ‘technological change’; its adaptation to the potential of merchandising at home and outside the US; and, its commitment to ‘synergistic … global expansion’, including the hugely important ownership of a television network (2001: 17). Alongside such features of business strategy designed to return profit to investors in the publicly traded (since 1957) company, Wasko isolates aspects of what we might crudely call ‘content’: IP; the ‘proliferation of Disney images and characters’, some of which were eventually ‘modernized’ as the company adapted to new times (2001: 17–8).9 Wasko’s profile sets out the deployment of this IP within the various strategies planned and driven by individuals whose management influence centred on successfully building the company first of all into a rival for its former distribution partners Columbia, UA and RKO (under Walt and Roy Disney), and later – under CEO Michael Eisner – rebuilding it in the corporate image of connected entertainment behemoth that would fix it as the envy of 1990s Hollywood; and more widely, allow it to epitomize the dream of situating that IP production, protection and exploitation far beyond theatrical film within international ‘leisure markets, … television, tourism, theme parks and consumer merchandise’ (Grainge, 2008: 44).

Elsewhere, Wasko categorizes this overview as within the remit of the political economy tradition, which she points out has been fruitfully applied in communications research since the late 1950s (2001: 28–9). The study of ownership and control is the crucial element informing the approach; although not obviously textual in the way of other preoccupations of media research, this focus keeps together political and economic dimensions, thereby rendering a type of analysis that can serve as the ground for ideological analysis. However, Grainge raises a key limitation of political economy approaches to those global media brands that trade in populist image production, this being the ‘generalizing impulse’ that assumes ‘impoverishment’ of cultural life as an automatic by-product of the imposition of brand marketing (2008: 7). This book does not embrace political economic methods to an extent which could con...