In this week’s episode of The Discourse, your host Mike DeAngelo and Playlist Editor-in-Chief Rodrigo Perez, jump on the mic to talk with Joanna Robinson, one of the writers on the new book “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” co-written by Dave Gonzales and, Gavin Edwards.
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Given everything that’s happened/happening to Marvel this year, this fall and this weekend—the flop of “The Marvels,” the studio’s lowest-grossing opening ever and their first major failure in, well, forever—the book and the conversation, is timely.
Robinson is a veteran journalist who has worked for Vanity Fair, many other outlets and currently works at the Ringer. For the book, her Gonzales and Edwards interviewed over 100 people and sources to tell the Marvel Studios story, from the early days of Stan Lee and producer Avi Arad, the pre-inception of Marvel Studios (when Marvel had movies and characters scattered all over at places like Universal, Paramount and of course 20th Century Fox), the big gamble of making Marvel Studios with Kevin Feige, all the risks they took and more.
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The book leads all the way into 2023 and documents what Robinson calls “The Marvel Wobble” year, the year everything started to seemingly come apart and has become extremely prescient given what happened with “The Marvels.” These final chapters discuss the poor reception to “Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania”—something that surprised Marvel as they thought they had a banger ready to go— and the complexities (and arrogance) of making television in the Marvel formula, rather than making TV the way its historically been made—something that came to an unfortunate apex with The Marvel TV Reckoning, which exploded this all when “Daredevil: Born Again,” already half-shot, was scrapped in favor of starting over (it was revealed in those reports that Marvel had finally acknowledged they were square-pegging their TV development and decided to go the traditional route of hiring showrunners and creating show bibles instead of just “fixing it in post” the way they usually do).
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Even if you’re a movie reporter or online news junkie and you know or remember many of these stories, ‘The Reign of Marvel Studios’ is an entertaining, compelling and fascinating must-read. Seeing it all laid out in context also just illuminates much of what made Marvel so special—the risks they took—how they changed the course of the movie business and dominated for years— while hinting at the troubles that 2023 and “The Wobble” are creating for the studio in the future. As Robinson puts it herself (though she’s loathe to use the term given who is was originated by), the book is a “fair and balanced,” portrait of Marvel, and from an outsider’s perspective that’s accurate. ‘The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ isn’t a fan celebration and it’s not a critical attack on the company either, instead, much more of an investigative deep dive into the highs, lows, and everything in between with an acknowledgement that whether you like them or not, Marvel movies have deeply impacted the state of movies over the past decade and beyond.
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One of the most interesting disclosures revealed in ‘The Reign of Marvel Studios’ is how Disney’s Bob Iger essentially forced Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios (along with Lucasfilm), to announce many projects in December 2020, during the height of the pandemic at Disney Investors Day, that Marvel just wasn’t ready to announce yet. This was of course, during the era when everyone was panicking, and trying to assure Wall Street that, don’t worry, even if movie theaters are closed, Disney+ will provide ample content. Cut to three years later and Iger is saying Marvel “lost focus” due to the over-saturation of projects on Disney+ which Robinson aptly says is a bit like that “We’re All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This “meme from “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.”
In this podcast conversation, Robinson talks about writing the book, the challenges they faced, recaps much of the highlights, plus there is a lot of talk about the state of Marvel, how they can fix it, what she thought about “The Marvels,” and predictions. Some of those range from what we might see in “Avengers: Secret Wars” (Marvel cameos from folks like Robert Downey Jr.) and what we may not see onDisney+ (Robinson reiterates she heard that “Wonder Man” was scrapped and said she’d also heard the same about “Daredevil” before the news went public). She also suggest that we should expect Marvel to scale back and do less on TV just as the company itself has said this year.
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I posit that “The Marvel Wobble,” going into the Marvel’s opening weekend—we conversed just before the movie hit theaters—was becoming “The Marvel Buckle,” with the studio coming down to one knee for the first time ever.
That’s seemingly come to pass, but Robinson reminds us not to count out Marvel just yet, as they will clearly try and post-mortem their recent failures and try and understand how to course-correct and re-steer the ship. Either way, it’s a pretty great conversation if we do say ourselves and you can listen to the entirety of it below. “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” is available now via all book retailers digital, physical or otherwise.