The New Yorker's MCU expos

>By 2001, Yost, then twenty-seven, was getting an M.F.A. in film business in Los Angeles, but he wanted to be a writer; he had written an unproduced screenplay about an alien invasion. He heard that Marvel had a new West Coast outpost and cold-called for an interview. The studio shared a small office with a company that made kites. There were six employees. One of them, a guy in a ball cap who was also in his late twenties, sat Yost down for what turned into a “comic book trivia-off.” The interviewer, whose name was Kevin Feige, asked, “What issue does Spider-Man get his black costume in?”

>“Oh, that’s a trick question,” Yost said. (The black suit first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man No. 252, but its origins weren’t revealed until the crossover series Secret Wars.) He landed a summer internship, working from a desk belonging to Stan Lee, Marvel’s legendary former editor-in-chief, who rarely came in. The company, which had filed for bankruptcy a few years earlier, had set up the L.A. branch to license Marvel characters to Hollywood; Yost’s job was to dig through the vast library of characters and help package them for studios, “basically try to drum up interest.” He and Feige had long bull sessions about Namor, a sea-dwelling mutant. On the last day of his internship, Yost left the executives a sci-fi sample script, and he got a job writing for the animated series “X-Men: Evolution.”

>Cut to 2010. Yost, having built up his résumé on cartoons, was asked to join a writing lab at Marvel Studios, which was making its own live-action features, with astonishing success.

>Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, which studies audience behavior, pointed to Marvel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why it gets people to the theatre: “They’re carnival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.”

>Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.” Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writers, who are currently striking over the constricted economics of streaming, also complain of the constricted imaginations of TV executives: instead of searching for the next “Mad Men,” they’re hunting for Batman spinoffs.

>Detractors see the brand’s something-for-everyone approach as nefarious. An executive at a rival studio, who called the MCU “the Death of All Cinema,” told me that the dominance of Marvel movies “has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies had been struggling at the box office, and he groused, “If people want a comedy, they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant-Man’ as their comedy now.”

>You might picture arriving for your first day of work on a Marvel movie and being handed a leather-bound bible of character mythology. Instead, directors who are in the running for their first Marvel job are given a fifteen-or-so-page “discussion document,” distilled from corporate brainstorming retreats. Landing the job requires not slavish adherence to the document but a nifty approach to executing it. The movies are shot all over the world but edited in Burbank, on the same lot as Feige’s office. Each film’s creative team meets multiple times a week with Marvel’s upper management—until recently, a group known as the Trio, consisting of Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria Alonso. Filmmakers also receive notes from the Parliament, a group of senior creative executives who are each assigned to individual projects but review them all as a committee.

>All this corporate machinery may sound oppressive, but Marvel collaborators tend to describe their experiences as surprisingly free-form and hands-off. One editor referred to Marvel’s oversight as a “pinkie on the steering wheel.” “There wasn’t anything dictated at all,” Joe Johnston, who directed the first Captain America film, told me. Erik Sommers, who co-wrote the Spider-Man trilogy, recalled that Marvel assistants had put together a document that explained the difference between a “universe” and a “dimension.” But otherwise, he said, “it’s not a giant diagram of preëxisting dots that need to be connected in a certain order.”

I wonder how everything would’ve turned out if marvel never let themselves be bought by Disney

It's the other way around, Hollywood swalllowed these comic universes because they realized they could make the same movie over and over and keep raking in money from morons who don't want to read and orgasm when they hear a familiar name. Now frick off back to Wrong board