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.