Cody reads about Marvel.
MCU: THE REIGN OF MARVEL STUDIOS by Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards, and Joanna Robinson
I have been a Marvel Comics fan for as long as I can remember. Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, The Punisher, etc., they were all a major part of my childhood. The top hero of my youth was a Marvel guy: Ghost Rider. Sure, I would occasionally branch out and follow the adventures of characters who were set up at the Distinguished Competition, but those never captured my imagination or gave me as much entertainment as I found in the pages of Marvel comics. When I was growing up, the feeling was that Marvel had the better comics, but DC had the better adaptations. That old Spider-Man TV show, the Albert Pyun Captain America movie, the Dolph Lundgren Punisher flick, they just couldn’t match up to the likes of Richard Donner’s Superman, Tim Burton’s Batman, or the old Superman and Batman TV shows. That Incredible Hulk show was pretty cool, though... But anyway, as a Marvel fan, I have found it truly marvelous to see my beloved company and its characters finally rise up in the world of adaptations, the awesome likes of Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Fox’s X-Men, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man paving the way for the astounding achievement of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise of interconnected stories that now consists of dozens of films and TV shows.
Compiled by Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards, and Joanna Robinson, the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios is an unauthorized look at the behind-the-scenes twists and turns that allowed Marvel to go from licensing their characters out to the likes of New Line Cinema (Blade), Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil), and Sony (Spider-Man, Ghost Rider), getting small amounts of upfront cash and none of the films’ profits, to starting their own production studio, securing a distribution deal with Paramount, then moving over to Disney, and building the MCU.
Great decisions like the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man are chronicled here, along with talk of disagreements between executives, toy-minded business men with antiquated ideas of what audiences won’t respond to, and the building of highly successful movies... as well as some projects that fell by the wayside, like a big screen adaptation of the comic book The Runaways. It’s also revealed that Marvel has been tinkering with the Blade property for longer than we knew; a reboot was officially announced with Mahershala Ali taking the title role in 2019, and that project has been making its way through development hell ever since, but there were writers at Marvel working on Blade reboot scripts well before 2019.
Gonzales, Edwards, and Robinson may not have been able to interview some of the key players, but they got information from inside sources, and also did a mind-blowing amount of research, seemingly combing through every interview quote that has been given about Marvel projects in the last 30 years or so.
If you’re curious to hear how the MCU came together, or if you’re a Marvel fan who wants to dig into and celebrate the story of the company finding so much success, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios is a great read. I went through this book’s 500 pages at Quicksilver speed; I was so captivated that I didn’t want to put it down.
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