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Marvel’s string of huge international movie hits over the past 9 years may now have an air of inevitability about them, but it wasn’t always obvious that the studio would become such a juggernaut. Last weekend Marvel notched its 12th "B" in worldwide box office grosses, but less than a decade ago the matter of its success or failure was a big question mark.
Strange as it may seem now, when Marvel raised its 10-picture, half-billion dollar film production fund in 2005 in order to take its filmmaking destiny into its own hands, it was far from certain that the new venture would succeed. Up until that point the company had had decidedly mixed success in licensing its characters and stories to third party movie producers—for every Blade and X-Men success there had been a Howard the Duck or Captain America (1990) failure.
There were two main reasons to believe that Marvel might fail. First was its inexperience as a self-contained production company. Sure, Hollywood’s studios had pulled off some hits with the aforementioned Blade and X-Men becoming successful franchises for New Line and Fox, but The Punisher had failed twice with two different companies, and Fox couldn’t make a hit of Frank Miller’s Elektra. If such a major studio with its massive resources in development, production, marketing and distribution could fail with their IP, how could a small company that had recently verged on bankruptcy make a go of it?
The second reason for skepticism was the Marvel library. Even though there were 5,000 characters to choose from, few of them seemed worthy at the time of sustaining interesting, let alone blockbuster, franchises. The biggest and the best of the bunch, Spiderman and X-Men, had been licensed off to other studios and were thus unavailable to the Marvel team. The comic book company couldn’t compete, the reasoning went, against the big guns that Warner’s DC Comics owned, Batman, Superman, and yes, Wonder Woman, among others. If Marvel was to make a go of it, it would have to do so with characters that didn’t have nearly that sort of a hold on fans and the general public’s imagination. It was difficult to imagine at the time what the 10 films would even be, much less to think that they would be worth watching.
Even after Marvel’s Iron Man, a seemingly unlikely character for a breakout franchise, became a success in 2008, the second Marvel Cinematic Universe picture, The Incredible Hulk, fizzled, grossing just $263 million worldwide on a $150 million budget later that same year.
But what no one knew for certain back then was what a tremendous asset the studio had in Kevin Feige. The Boston-born, USC-educated Marvel executive had been an executive producer and co-producer on many of Marvel’s prior collaborations with other studios, but now he was the one calling the shots. And it turned out he had several key talents that would propel the company into the movie stratosphere. He has a knack for melding action with comedy and pathos in just the right blend to create crowd-pleasing hits. A shrewd ability to balance fidelity to the details of the original comic book stories with accessibility for newcomers to the Marvel story world. And a keen eye for choosing the right talent for the right roles, whether it’s an actor like Robert Downey Jr. or Chris Pratt who bring their own unique personas to their characters, directors like Jon Favreau, James Gunn and the Russo brothers, and the many talented writers who have shaped so many excellent stories and raised the bar for the superhero genre.
That has all translated into storybook-level for success for Marvel. Four of the 16 films in its MCU franchise have earned over a billion dollars each at the global box office (The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Captain America: Civil War), and Spider-Man: Homecoming looks likely to join that club. The $12 billion the studio has earned with these 16 films has left behind such other giant franchises as the Harry Potter movies ($7.7 billion over 8 films), the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies ($5.8 billion over 6 films) and the Fast and Furious films ($5.1 billion across 8 films).
With a couple of handfuls of new MCU movies in production or active development and more than 4,900 additional characters to work with, Marvel may already have its next $12 billion in the bag.
