MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

This is quite a stunning delve into the Marvel movie world. I follow Joanna Robinson's podcasting work and have been excited to read this for some time. Even so, I wasn't prepared for just how thorough this is while being totally gripping and endlessly readable.

There are some humdingers in this book, especially concerning the early days of Marvel's cinematic efforts and how figures like Ike Perlmutter fit in. It is so clear that some folks have no sense at all of what an audience wants to see - one of the most astonishing bits of this book was a quote citing executives wondering, who wants to see superheroes fight each other? Baffling.

My favorite piece of “little” trivia is that Kenneth Branagh thought aloud about not calling Mjolnir by its name, instead calling it Uru, because he found "Mjolnir" hard to say. Can you imagine!? There are several bits of Branagh in one chapter that I loved, actually.

I couldn't put this down. In a recent The Big Picture podcast, Sean Fennessey said that comic book movies are “dead as disco.” I doubt that very much (and he could have been dryly joking), but they are clearly in a fragile state right now. This book helps illuminate how Marvel came to totally dominate our cultural experience and the price it's paying for that and for the constant demands of more and faster. It also makes clear just how indispensable Kevin Feige is to the whole concoction, if there was ever any doubt.

I loved this way more than I expected. It was quite a page turner. My takeaway from this book is just how hard it was to actually make something like the MCU and how Kevin Feige really deserves a lot of the credit for it. This book in general is pretty pro-Feige; for good reason - a large portion of the book sets up a conflict between the scrappy, entertainment-minded underdog Kevin Feige and billionaire toy-minded, petty Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter who is basically a real life cartoon character.

The difference in philosophy between these two makes the behind the scenes drama really compelling, and made me really respect Feige as a conciliator with great patience and his eyes on the goal. Ike Perlmutter is the worst.

Beyond that, though, there was also just a lot of cool information about the various MCU projects; and the book offers a pretty compelling reason why Post-Endgame has not been working out very well for them. In fact, Robinson et al made me cautiously optimistic for upcoming MCU content for the first time in a little while due to how recent changes have affected Marvel. We'll see how it goes.

Overall, highly recommended for MCU fans, film fans, or just people who want to know about how Hollywood/the film industry etc works.