By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, out in paperback this week.

I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel movies or just someone living in a world dominated by them, the book is a really interesting look into contemporary filmmaking and the pressures and economics and just simply human scale of these massive operations.

We spoke about Marvel’s journey from underdog to cultural icon, how its moviemaking process has changed over time, and what it was like covering a narrative that was developing in real time.

Robinson and Gonzales can both be found on the podcast Trial by Content, and the book can be found wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Dave and Joanna, thank you so much for coming on.

GONZALES: Absolutely.

ROBINSON: Thanks for having us.

I really, really love this book. So happy to see it out in paperback. I guess I'll just kick it off with an easy one: What were each of your first experiences with Marvel? How'd you get into this?

ROBINSON: As in the comic books or the films?

Anything.

ROBINSON: Anything at all. Gosh, I think X-Men: The Animated Series was my introduction, back in my infancy. It really got into the world they created, the various characters, their character sets, the trading cards, and then everything spirals out from there. That was my introduction.

GONZALES: Mine was probably with the comics. I might have had some X-Men: The Animated Series in there, but I got much more into the comics around late 1993, early '94, when I happened to buy a Spider-Man issue that was part of “The Trial of Peter Parker.” Suddenly I had questions: Why was Peter Parker on trial? How many different Spider-Man books were there? Because I bought an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man, but the next part of “The Trial of Peter Parker” was The Amazing Spider-Man.

That led me to get a cubby at my local comic book shop in Louisville, Colorado, which was Time Warp Comics at the time. That was my way in, just being a comic book fan. I also jumped in on one of the longest and mostly considered worst Spider-Man arcs, but loved it. So imagine how good “good” Spider-Man was to me as a child, because I got weaned in on “bad” Spider-Man.

Amazing. One reason I really dug the book is that it's about the MCU, but it's also about Marvel, the history of this entire company, and its very different evolution over time, from the '60s to the period of the '90s. What was it like trying to cover not just a film series, but a big franchise with a lot of moving parts as part of an even bigger company with even more moving parts?

ROBINSON: A good question we asked ourselves was both where to start and where to end, and where to end was a constant, ongoing question mark. I'll let Dave address that. But in terms of where to start, there were certain things we felt we had to backdate, because there were players involved in the major “How did Marvel Studios come to be?” question and you had to know who they were, why they were important, how did we get here and what were the stakes? Being able to loosely explain who's Stan Lee, who's Perlmutter, who's Avi Arad, who are all these people, helped us tell that story without losing the audience entirely by throwing a bunch of new names at them. Dave, what about ending the book?

GONZALES: Oh, ending the book. That was super fun. We started right as Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. I remember seeing Endgame and knowing that Joanna and I were going to work on this, so we started off thinking, what a fantastic hill that Marvel climbed, this interconnected universe with three phases. Everything surely was planned out from the beginning and could only go up from here. The book was originally “The Rise of Marvel Studios,” because we thought surely this was just up and up and up.

Then the pandemic hit — which was very good for us, having to write the book and just sit down and figure out what it was. It also gave us and a lot of sources a pause to regain our footing. As Marvel started rolling out, we tried to peg an end date. I wanted it to be Blade to Blade when we started, but Mahershala Ali's project has still not come out, so that became an impossibility. Then WandaVision premiered and suddenly there was this whole other aspect to the story we were trying to tell. So we wanted to do that and just tried to report things as they went along.

We were blessed and cursed by the year that we published the hardcover, October 2023. As we were turning in the final part of the book in January and February, a whole bunch of Marvel news started breaking. Ike Perlmutter left Disney; Victoria Alonso, who was a big mover and shaker in Marvel Studios, was let go, so we had to report that out; Jonathan Majors went on trial.

It was only in a panic over all those things that I really ended up appreciating what we had done just by thinking of all these topics so thoroughly for several years. Even though we were tacking new endings on, it wasn't that hard to make it feel like it was a whole arc because we were kind of working there anyway. I wouldn't say I'd've enjoyed releasing the first version of this book in one of Marvel's worst financial years and most critical years ever, but I do think it provided an interesting little tie-off or a fascinating ellipses that allowed us to be relevant and, more importantly, in the year 2024, look like we knew exactly what we were talking about in Marvel's rebounds.

That's a really good point. When I met you on tour, a key thing you were getting at was that the idea that Marvel has not had a slump before is naive, and also ahistorical. A fun thing about the book is that you go through all these different eras, and sure, there's an easier story and probably a more polished, corporate story that's ever upward, toward Excelsior, all that crap.

But you really do cover the pits and troughs of this. There was Iron Man 2; there was Thor: The Dark World; there was that period of time between the assorted Spider-Mans. What was that perspective like, particularly as it was coming out and as you were able to talk about the issues in 2023?

ROBINSON: It was important for us, just on a basic journalistic level, to try to tell as much of the story as possible. We're fans of Marvel, of the movies, but as long as I've known Dave, both of us have been people who don't like to feel like we're not being told the whole story. We don't want the PR version of something — we want to know all the messy details as well. And it's not to knock Marvel or have any kind of “gotcha” moment. It's to say, “Okay, they had these various pitfalls, these various problematic people that they were working with, X, Y and Z. Look what they accomplished anyway.” That's the story in broad strokes. It was important for us to be able to acknowledge the stumbles along the way.

When we found ourselves in a 2023 space where everyone was saying Marvel is cooked, or Marvel used to know exactly what it was doing from the beginning and now they're just making it up — no, they were always making it up. They just did it so well, you didn't notice. That gave us a better perspective to be able to say, let's just slow down. We were looking ahead to 2024, saying they're only putting out one movie and two shows next year. If those hit, then you'll start to hear that Marvel's back, baby. Then Deadpool & Wolverine makes a gajillion dollars and Agatha All Along is a pretty solid hit for them.

So I think that “Marvel is over” narrative that was so prevalent a year ago is now the question, “Is Marvel back?” Looking even further forward at the next couple of big projects coming, I think Captain America: Brave New World is going to be a tough one for them. I don't know if that's going to hit the way a lot of people want it to. I think Thunderbolts is going to be hit for them, and I think The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to be hit for them. They're still getting their bearings, but to your point, it was a bit naive to say they've been nothing but successful and now they've run off a cliff. Dave, what do you think?

GONZALES: It was just a less interesting narrative, ultimately. I actually found myself getting less adversarial the more we learned, especially being a fan when all this started around 2008. There was this idea that Joanna was talking about, which is even a fan perspective today, that if something doesn't work out it's because we've been denied something at some creative step. Like, you know what, screw those guys; we want to do Harrison Ford as Red Hulk instead, or something like that.

But it's not that at all. There are a whole bunch of different drama and production and business problems, and all these things come together to make these gigantic machines of a movie work. It was really important for us to drill down on Marvel Studios and get into those ups and downs, because a lot of times you can try to compare Marvel Studios to something through contrast, through Warner Brothers trying to do it with DC back in the early 2010s. Everybody started trying to launch an interconnected universe from the first movie, but all you could really say is that Marvel's worked and these others didn't. The details of the alchemy are in the tiny stories and little conflicts. That's why I think they were so important to track, be they how movie stars look or how we use CGI to make movie stars look. Tracking that over at Marvel Studios was just as important as how many movies Tony Stark was going to be in.

Can you speak more to how much of this was on the fly? One of my big takeaways from your book was just how much things aren't necessarily set in stone during the production of a movie, and how sometimes one person's smart idea, regardless of where it comes from, can drastically alter what a lot of folks think was written in stone in 2007.

ROBINSON: That idea of “best idea wins” — without ego; best idea from whomsoever — was a prevailing concept at Marvel. Kevin Feige was also this really interesting figure that has no comparison at any other studio. He's head of the studio, a creative producer, a storyteller in his own right and someone who wanted to make movies as a kid and thought he would be a director. He wound up an executive, but he has that storytelling sense. When Marvel was putting out fewer films and TV shows — or no TV shows at all and just a few films a year — the process was, “Go shoot your movie. Bring me, Kevin Feige, back the pieces and I'll tell you what you're missing.” They had this built-in reshoot window where you could go and add scenes where he felt like you hadn't really nailed this character, or cut this action out to bump up the action over here a bit more. They had this rough-drafting process with the master editor being Kevin Feige himself. There's no system like that at any other studio.

That works so well for them, and in doing so, they're able to cement over the cracks and make it all feel like one smooth story that they're telling, because that refining process is built into their filmmaking process. Once the mandate comes from Disney, from Iger on his way out the door, from Chapek in his seat for a while, that they need to compete with Netflix and all these other streaming services, that they need more and more content — then the pace becomes untenable for that revision process that made them so solid in the first place.

You talk about Feige not having an analog. I was really shocked reading the book because there's not even anything recent. You have to go back to Cecil B. DeMille for someone who has that producer, authorial presence. He's really a fascinating figure, and it's a key takeaway from the book that I loved. It really highlights the people who make these movies, not just the corporation. It's actual human beings who do this kind of stuff, often with long continuities. Do you want to speak about some of that?

GONZALES: Definitely. Actually, while you were talking, I was wondering if part of the chip on Zack Snyder's shoulder was because someone at some point told him he was going to be a Kevin Feige and he's been chasing that ever since.

A lot of the Marvel continuity that's been going on is still going on, even after our new chapter. It's been interesting to see how it's developed. It could be that the best idea wins, but then they also have that old school, in-house process where the starting team is very often the same people and has been since phase one. You put together a bullpen of concept artists, so you're constantly using concept art. Not only is that smart from a design standpoint for making a movie, but then you can have those things scanned and it goes directly into making toys. So at the beginning, there's no fight about bringing on these design creatives super early on.

Where we start to see the wear and tear is, as Joanna was saying, with this output increase. All of the pressure starts being put on post-production, which is the place where you can't make more time. The solution is to hire more people, and because of that, the job of keeping things consistent falls to Victoria Alonso.

She does a pretty good job considering that she's working a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week work schedule because the industry is so messed up. It was never built to do stuff like this. In a lot of ways, the way the VFX industry is structured is still from the '90s turn of the century, when you would bid on a number of shots to do and get money for that number of shots. You'd have to work those shots until they get approved by the director. There isn't an extra budget, and there isn't an overtime, which was a fine way to do it when there were three or four VFX shots in every movie. But now that we're in the 200s or some such, there's a natural strain put on that, and it's impossible to budget on the VFX side. They have to underbid because there's a limited amount of work. If Marvel decides they don't like you, as much as a third of your entire year's work can just not come to your company.

As Marvel ages into it, we get a lot of people who are able to make their careers there, from Kevin Feige to Mary Livanos, who's doing great things on Agatha and seems really close to being ascendant. We have Brad Winderbaum, who's been made head of streaming now to take some of that pressure off Kevin. You have all these great continuities. You're less likely to see continuities in visual effects artists, just because of how they're going recently. When Joanna and I were interviewing people like ILM for Hulk, occasionally we'd do a person that was in three or four movies. Now, like for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there was a team of about 12 people at Framestore who make animals look good. They just come in for that movie to make animals look incredibly good. They did it the whole time, but they're not as legacy as other parts of the Marvel development studios — which I hope will change, because there are some people who are really good at making Hulks. And if you've made Hulks for 20 years, shouldn't those be the people that are making Hulks in Brave New World? We'll have to see.

ROBINSON: I love that you mentioned Cecil B. DeMille. As we were putting this whole story together and realizing that they bring all these teams in-house, Dave and our coauthor Gavin and I, we are to varying degrees students of old Hollywood history, and we had this realization that it's just the old Hollywood studio system. You're putting actors under contract for nine movies, all this other stuff, and we felt so smart. Then I was talking to someone who worked at Marvel and they were like, “Oh yeah, Kevin says that all the time.” I was like, oh, I thought we really put something together. But at least we were right! We were consciously doing this.

I think that industrial element of it is really interesting. A key thing that changed the way I see the film industry was realizing that every movie is basically a corporation that briefly exists. Every movie is an entire apparatus, with a CEO operation and departments and all that. Then it folds and you move on to the next one.

With Marvel, though, the circus never closes; it's just onto the next city. It was really interesting to see its place in the industry. Like Dave was saying, the limiting reactant for some of this is just the number of animators on the earth who are capable of making this kind of stuff. It's so cool to get a look inside this apparatus through the book.

ROBINSON: Thank you.

GONZALES: What an apparatus. It's really interesting to me, even now, as we are pending the return of the Russo brothers, who are just able to find this and also find the emotion in it.

In Endgame, the Tony Stark “I am Iron Man” moment was the last insert. They had to go to dinner with Robert Downey Jr. and Joel Silver and have Silver be like, “You'd be dumb not to do it, Robert,” because Downey didn't want to go back there. He's a weird dude, but for him, it felt like in order to get to what he needed to do, he had to take off a scab that had formed and get back into the character. Whereas the Russo brothers are like, we built a workout system and we have our smoothies and every day is trying to make the machine work. Somehow, through the alchemy of those two things, the machine works, and occasionally we get these story moments that feel like they were created individually for that movie.

That, I think, is the mystery that the book is trying to unravel. At the beginning, it's untapped storytelling potential. Everyone's like, if you don't have the X-Men, if you don't have Spider-Man, what do you have? There's so much in just proving that you have good stories. Now that you're the biggest game in town, that idea of, “Are you going to make me feel anything?” is so much different than what the initial promise was, that they're going to bring Thanos to the screen and you're going to understand who he is and what he wants. That was the big lift. Now there's a whole simultaneous saving of the industry, and bestowing status on different actors. There's just so much more mixed up in it now. It's amazing we got where we did.

The book is also a really interesting look at the transition from being a super underdog. As you describe in the earliest chapters of the book, Marvel was bankrupt, and all the executives were folks who fell out of the toy industry or Revlon. The folks who were in charge came to it in the manner of somebody accidentally having to join a carnival, and then eventually it becomes the hegemonic juggernaut of everything, in many ways the thing that people stand against. In the book, watching the perception around it change and then internally having to adapt to that change in perception was a really cool tension.

ROBINSON: My favorite indicator of that underdog status versus top-of-the-world status versus wherever we are now is the making of the first Iron Man movie. Marvel Entertainment in New York — who was, to your point, chiefly concerned with merchandising and toys — had the attitude, “Okay, go make your cute little movie. If it doesn't cost us any money, you can go do your little cinematic experiment in Hollywood and we don't really care that much. Just make sure you don't spend any of our money. Other than that, go have fun.”

And they make Iron Man, and Iron Man is a massive, smash hit, and all of a sudden the people in New York are like, we're forming something called the Creative Committee. We would like a lot of intake. We want to be part of this. This is the big shiny thing, and everyone wants to weigh in on it. So it's really interesting to track this going from a weird little project they were doing out in Los Angeles to The Thing for Marvel. You can track it by who needs to have an opinion about what and when they start to care.

GONZALES: One of my favorite moments — it's after the book chapter “Marvel vs. the Creative Committee” — is when Kevin Feige gets on stage himself to unveil the entirety of phase three, which includes Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and everything. That is such a telling moment for me. He had just won his battles with these behind the scenes. He's fully in full control. Black Panther is coming. Joss Whedon is in the edits for Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the audience, but they already know he's not coming back.

There was a version of a chapter in the book that was just me going through that and being like, here's why each one of these announcements is like Kevin Feige spiking a football in the face of someone that told him he couldn't do it. That's still the purest creative energy I've seen. “We could finally do it!” burst out of Marvel. I think they've been more reserved since, even with some big announcements, but I like to go back and look at that just to see the pivot point when Marvel was the underdog. It was like, we want Black Panther, we want Captain Marvel, but the studio won't let us do it. Then Kevin Feige gets up and goes, “Here are the next 10 years of your life.” It's just such a joyous moment.

ROBINSON: We love that moment. We talked to people behind the scenes who were working at Marvel at the time about it, and there's a reason that whole presentation wasn't at a Comic-Con. It wasn't at D23. It was its own thing at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles, and internally, they jokingly called it Kevin-Con. It was this whole thing, and part of it was that they weren't ready to announce certain things at Comic-Con.

But part of it was this moment for Feige who fought various personalities across the various companies to get control of the narrative. And I agree, Endgame is of course in all of history going to be looked at as the pinnacle of achievement at Marvel. But I actually think it might be Kevin-Con at the El Capitan Theater, when Chadwick Boseman comes out and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are there to anoint him as the future of the franchise. That, of course, comes with its own terrible poignancy. We were really lucky to talk to Chadwick Boseman for the book before he passed away. These were things that happened while we were writing the book. History was constantly happening as we were trying to frame this entire narrative.

If there's a protagonist in the book, it feels like it's Kevin, even in the earliest days when he was advising on the Fox products. Having read the book and then seen Deadpool & Wolverine — which, as you mentioned, went on to become a phenomenal financial success — it was really cool to come away with a little more admiration for the role that Kevin had in some of the Fox properties. Seeing that manifest in the MCU was just really nice.

ROBINSON: I love that he got to have his Wolverine story, given that it all starts with him in a trailer with Hugh Jackman saying it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger. I love that.

GONZALES: I don't even know if it's still called that, but Joanna used to call that the “Feige fix-it.” Instead of developing these things by always going forward and introducing younger Avengers, he's actually much more interested in reaching back. There were good things there. Or, I guess the generous way to think about it is rewarding the fans that were around before it was the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, “You didn't waste your time with X-Men: The Last Stand. I know it might have felt like that occasionally, but here's this. Or Andrew Garfield. Yeah, maybe we treated him badly, but don't worry. You didn't waste your time with that because boom, here it is paying off in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Initially there was some hesitancy about Marvel homework. Do I need to have seen these things to do these things? But ultimately, if we're just talking dollars and cents, the nostalgia play has made them a billion dollars so many times that it doesn't surprise me that Deadpool & Wolverine is a huge hit just by being a swan song for the Fox movies.

ROBINSON: I was personally incredibly gratified to finally get Channing Tatum as Gambit. That was a very important moment for me.

My favorite version of the Feige fix-it was putting the storyline from Thor: The Dark World into Endgame and making Thor: The Dark World, the most universally mocked and reviled MCU film, an integral part of their biggest triumph. All of a sudden that's wrapped into the larger tapestry in a way so you can't just toss it in the garbage and say, oh, don't bother watching Thor: The Dark World — now you have to watch it to understand everything you're seeing in Endgame, which is certainly not a movie you're ever going to skip.

It's a magic trick that really works and almost shouldn't work as well as it does. But even how they were able to get the Infinity Stones, almost taking elements of the first couple films that were dropped or introduced somewhat randomly and then doing that. It's a trick that they keep on pulling.

GONZALES: Kevin Feige will say this, but we're coming up on 80 years of comic book history, and if there's one thing that comic books do more than any other medium, it's just use the same story. How could you have another angle on this story? They have so much A/B testing on what we like about this character, or what we'll buy about a certain character, it's interesting to see Marvel adapt that along with what sort of story you like on the Hollywood side of it.

But yeah, we're going to see Captain America: Brave New World and finally see that Celestial that came out of the ocean in Eternals. Every Marvel property contributes something, we're told. Except the Inhumans; that never happens.

The book is MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, and it's a fascinating look at the intersection of the humanity behind these movies and the technology of these movies. And if there's one figure that reminds me of that in particular, obviously, one of the most central people in the Marvel universe is Green Steve. Let's talk a little about him before we wrap this one up.

ROBINSON: He's my favorite! Green Steve, a Chippendales dancer that was painted green in order to make sure they understood how the green light on skin would be captured accurately for the Hulk. Green Steve was one of my favorite anecdotes we got, and it was out of the book for a while before we worked it back in. Dave, what do you want to say about Green Steve?

GONZALES: I love Green Steve. I love that this bodybuilder from Long Island can technically say he played the Hulk in a sort of way. In theory, because it's a whole CGI character, he might have played the Hulk close to how much Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in that first movie. I love that story.

Pretty early on, we brought in Gavin Edwards, our third author, to help us do a book, since Joanna and I had never done a book before. We were starting to put together the notes and I was like, can we please have a mid-credits scene? Can we just have a chapter in the middle of the notes?

ROBINSON: That was Dave.

GONZALES: I held onto that for as long as possible. I remember in one of the final meetings after we turned in the draft, we pitched it up to the editor and they were like, “That's really fun,” and I thought, oh thank god. That was a really early idea, and Green Steve fits that perfectly; it's a super interesting story that doesn't really belong anywhere else, but will stick in your mind as, Marvel literally tried everything to make the best Hulk. So I'm very happy that it's the mid-credits chapter — and remains the mid-credits chapter! Even when we added another chapter in, we were like, where does this go? Not before Green Steve.

ROBINSON: He's got the final word for sure.

Amazing. The book's out of paperback now. Where can folks find it? Where can they find you? And what's next?

ROBINSON: “All good and evil news agents.” That's what the Empire Magazine folks say. All good and evil bookstores or any online book purveyor is where you can find our book. Dave does a tremendous podcast called Fighting in the War Room, which I love to listen to, so you should listen to that. And together we do a podcast called Trial by Content that y'all should listen to.

GONZALES: Joanna's on a fantastic podcast called the House of R with Mallory Rubin over on The Ringer, where she covers lots of cool pop culture things. If you want to go to a bookstore and don't know exactly which one to go to, you could head to theMCUbook.com. That will forward you to our publisher's website, which has links to your Barnes and Nobles, your Amazons, your Bookshops.org, and will help you track down the book near you. And look for us in a couple more years with something similar.

Thanks for coming on.

ROBINSON: Thanks, Walt.

GONZALES: Thank you.

Edited by Susie Stark.

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