Book #123 of 2023:
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards
A lengthy and informative behind-the-scenes account of the movie and TV juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with plenty of in-depth production details that I didn’t previously know, despite my being a pretty big fan of that series and having seen every single entry released thus far. The authors do a good job of relating the unlikely history of the record-smashing franchise born from a struggling comics company, especially when it comes to contextualizing the existing superhero adaptation landscape at launch, the complicated character rights with Marvel products like Spidey and the X-Men at rival studios, and the relative obscurity / unpopularity of now-household names like Iron Man and Captain America. (The former, in fact, was apparently only greenlit as the centerpiece of the interlocking saga’s debut film after a survey panel found he was the hero that kids were most interested in playing with as a toy upon hearing about the various powers of all the different options.) The whole enterprise was a bigger gamble than it might seem in hindsight, and was certainly less well-planned than the producers have liked to claim in public.
All of that is interesting to learn as a rags-to-riches triumph that perhaps carries the seeds of its eventual self-defeat — the Marvel machine scaling up to a pace where quality controls suffered and individual creators felt stifled under the uniform house style and the weight of connected continuity obligations — but as a book, this project is considerably hampered by its rather arbitrary 2023 publication date. The writers cover everything up to when their manuscript was presumably due in to the editors, but troubling later events like rising villain star Jonathan Majors getting arrested on assault charges or the newest Ant-Man sequel underperforming at the box office obviously don’t have the necessary distance for a full reckoning. This year could well be a turning point for the MCU, but this particular title isn’t capable of providing the definitive narrative of that as it does for the franchise’s origin story.
★★★☆☆
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