How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood

Growing up in Missouri, Christopher Yost had boxes of Marvel comic books, which his mother bought at the grocery store. None of his friends read Marvel; it was his own private world, a “sprawling story where all these characters lived in this universe together,” he recalled. Wolverine could team up with Captain America; Doctor Doom could fight the Red Skull. Unlike the DC comics, whose heroes (Superman, Batman) towered like gods, Marvel’s were relatably human, especially Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man. “He’s got money problems and girl problems, and his aunt May is always sick,” Yost said. “Every time you think he’s going to live this big, glamorous superhero life, it’s not that way. He’s a grounded, down-to-earth dude. The Marvel characters always seem to have personal problems.”

By 2001, Yost, then twenty-seven, was getting an M.F.A. in film business in Los Angeles, but he wanted to be a writer; he had written an unproduced screenplay about an alien invasion. He heard that Marvel had a new West Coast outpost and cold-called for an interview. The studio shared a small office with a company that made kites. There were six employees. One of them, a guy in a ball cap who was also in his late twenties, sat Yost down for what turned into a “comic-book trivia-off.” The interviewer, whose name was Kevin Feige, asked, “What issue does Spider-Man get his black costume in?”

“Oh, that’s a trick question,” Yost said. (The black suit first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man No. 252, but its origins weren’t revealed until the crossover series Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars.) He landed a summer internship, working from a desk belonging to Stan Lee, Marvel’s legendary former editor-in-chief, who rarely came in. The company, which had filed for bankruptcy a few years earlier, had set up the L.A. branch to license Marvel characters to Hollywood; Yost’s job was to dig through the vast library of characters and help package them for studios, “basically try to drum up interest.” He and Feige had long bull sessions about Namor, a sea-dwelling mutant. On the last day of his internship, Yost left the executives a sci-fi sample script, and he got a job writing for the animated series “X-Men: Evolution.”

Cut to 2010. Yost, having built up his résumé on cartoons, was asked to join a writing lab at Marvel Studios, which was making its own live-action features, with astonishing success. The previous year, after Marvel’s first film, “Iron Man,” earned more than five hundred million dollars, Disney had acquired the studio for four billion dollars. It now occupied a sprawling campus in Manhattan Beach, with its own soundstages. “Imagine an office building stapled to a hangar of an airport,” Yost said. Feige was now the studio’s president. He would bound from one conference room to another, as teams planned the next steps of what would become known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the M.C.U. Yost said, “The machine had started up.”

Yost was one of four writers who worked developing various characters, some of whom would eventually join the M.C.U. The first Thor film was under way, and Yost was asked to take a shot at a troublesome scene. Soon, he was sitting in front of the director, Kenneth Branagh, who had shaped the movie as a Shakespearean saga that pitted father against son and brother against brother—in space. Yost got in a few uncredited scenes. He went on to co-write the sequels “Thor: The Dark World” and “Thor: Ragnarok,” as the M.C.U. grew into the dominant force in global entertainment, pulling all of Hollywood into its orbit. “There’s a lot of pressure on Marvel,” Yost told me. “Everybody’s kind of waiting for them to mess up. But, at the end of the day, we’re really just trying to make the movies that we ourselves would like to watch.”

Whether you have spent the past decade and a half avoiding Marvel movies like scabies or are in so deep that you can expound on the Sokovia Accords, it is impossible to escape the films’ intergalactic reach. Collectively, the M.C.U. movies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have grossed more than twenty-nine billion dollars, making the franchise the most successful in entertainment history. The deluge of content extends to TV series and specials, with an international fan base that scours every teaser and corporate shakeup for clues about what’s coming next. As in the comics, the M.C.U.’s chief innovation is a shared fictional canvas, where Spider-Man can call on Doctor Strange, and Iron Man can battle Thor’s wily brother. Hollywood has always had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a web of interconnecting plots: new characters are introduced, either in their own movies or as side players in someone else’s, then collide in climactic Avengers films. In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”

Twenty years ago, few people would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole. Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes. The shift has come at a perilous time for moviegoing. Audiences, especially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer films in the theatre and streaming more from home, forcing studios to lean on I.P.-driven tentpoles like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, which studies audience behavior, pointed to Marvel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why it gets people to the theatre: “They’re carnival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.”

Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.” Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writers, who are currently striking over the constricted economics of streaming, also complain of the constricted imaginations of TV executives: instead of searching for the next “Mad Men,” they’re hunting for Batman spinoffs.

Marvel’s fanciful house style has rubbed off even on Oscar winners. This year’s Best Picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” had a Marvel-ish meld of walloping action, goofy humor, and multiverse mythology; it could have easily functioned as the origin story for a new Avenger. Marvel, meanwhile, has colonized nearly every other genre. “WandaVision” was a pastiche of classic sitcoms; “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” was a feminist legal comedy. Detractors see the brand’s something-for-everyone approach as nefarious. An executive at a rival studio, who called the M.C.U. “the Death of All Cinema,” told me that the dominance of Marvel movies “has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies had been struggling at the box office, and he groused, “If people want a comedy, they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant-Man’ as their comedy now.”

In some ways, Marvel harks back to the old studio system, in which Paramount and Warner Bros. kept stables of stars under seven-year contracts and M-G-M’s Freed Unit cranked out movie musicals on an assembly line. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the Marvel spy Nick Fury, signed a nine-picture deal with the company in 2009, and this summer will lead his own Disney+ series, “Secret Invasion.” The M.C.U. roster includes seasoned icons (Robert Redford, Glenn Close), mid-career stars (Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pratt), and breakout talents (Florence Pugh, Michael B. Jordan). It may be easier to count the conscientious objectors who haven’t gone Marvel, among them Timothée Chalamet, who has said that Leonardo DiCaprio once advised him, “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.” (This was after Chalamet auditioned for Spider-Man.)

Comic-book films have attracted top stars as far back as “Superman” (Marlon Brando, 1978) and “Batman” (Jack Nicholson, 1989), but the M.C.U., by design, can tie up an actor for years. Benedict Cumberbatch went from playing Hamlet to invoking “the grand calculus of the multiverse” as Doctor Strange. Portraying a Marvel character often means not just headlining movies but also filming cameos and crossovers, to the point that even the actor gets confused. Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Iron Man’s paramour, Pepper Potts, had no idea that she appeared in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” until the Marvel director Jon Favreau mentioned it to her on his cooking show.

It can be dispiriting to see so much acting talent sucked into the quantum realm of the M.C.U., presumably for a tidy sum, but the paychecks alone don’t explain Marvel’s hold over stars. “At some point, you want to be relevant,” an agent who represents several M.C.U. actors said. “Success is the best drug.” This year, Angela Bassett became the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar for a Marvel role, in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” “Well, it’s so modern,” she told me in February. “We try and stay current, and they’ve got a winning formula.” Entire generations now know Anthony Hopkins not as Hannibal Lecter but as Thor’s dad, King Odin of Asgard. “They put me in armor; they shoved a beard on me,” he told me. “Sit on the throne, shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.”

The result is a lot of hand-wringing over “the death of the movie star.” In an I.P.-driven ecosystem, individual stars no longer attract audiences to theatres the way they used to, with a handful of exceptions (Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts). You go to a Marvel movie to see Captain America, not Chris Evans. “It’s actually surprising to me how almost none of them have careers outside of the Marvel universe,” another agent said. “The movies don’t work. Look at all the ones Robert Downey, Jr., has tried to do. Look at Tom Holland. It’s been bomb after bomb after bomb.”

Marvel has similarly gobbled up screenwriters, special-effects artists, and workers from nearly every other profession in Hollywood—including directors, who are often snatched from other genres. Taika Waititi made the vampire mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” before getting placed in charge of Thor. Chloé Zhao went from moody, micro-budget Westerns to Marvel’s moody, macro-budget “Eternals.” Career paths that once led to Oscars now lead inexorably to the some-assembly-required world-building of the M.C.U. An agent who works with screenwriters complained, “I worry for the film industry, because, if you’re Chloé Zhao and you want to tell a story on a big canvas, mostly you’re limited to trying to tell it on a canvas of a big superhero.” He added, “It’s a pair of golden handcuffs.”

Dissenters have been loud. In 2019, Martin Scorsese pronounced Marvel movies “not cinema,” earning the undying enmity of comics fans. Last year, Quentin Tarantino lamented Marvel’s “choke hold” on Hollywood and said, “You have to be a hired hand to do those things.” When I mentioned this comment to Joe and Anthony Russo, brothers who directed four Marvel movies, including the highest grossing, “Avengers: Endgame,” Anthony said, “I don’t know if Quentin feels like he was born to make a Marvel movie, which is maybe why he would feel like a hired hand doing it. It depends on your relationship to the source material.” Joe added, “What fulfills us the most is building a sense of community around our work.” People involved in Marvel projects often talk about “playing in the sandbox,” which is another way of saying that the brand takes precedence over any individual voice—except that of Feige, the affable face of the franchise.

Industry people like to speculate about “Marvel fatigue,” which is mostly wishful thinking—though a recent series of creative missteps and corporate machinations have rivals salivating. As much as competitors gripe about Marvel, though, they’ve spent the past decade trying to emulate it. Marvel’s nemesis, DC Studios, which is owned by Warner Bros., has a hit-or-miss record, with often gritty, self-serious movies that lack Marvel’s zip and quality control. Last year, Warner Bros. brought in James Gunn (who directed Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy) and Peter Safran to reboot DC’s film universe, presumably in the image of the M.C.U. Sony, which shares the Spider-Man franchise with Marvel, is building out its Spider-verse with characters like Venom. In 2017, Universal announced its own Dark Universe, based on its classic monsters, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Russell Crowe) and the Invisible Man (Johnny Depp). After the first installment—“The Mummy,” starring Tom Cruise—disappointed, the plan was scrapped.

The lesson: you can’t wish a universe into existence, Genesis style. Marvel, which had a preëxisting tangle of comic-book plots to draw on, rolled out its movies methodically, gaining the audience’s trust. Goetz, the audience analyst, compared it to Apple: “The Marvel folks have an emotional handshake with their consumers.” Just as you can live your tech life within the frictionless confines of MacBooks and iPads, it’s possible to live your entire entertainment life in the Marvel universe, which pumps out a new series or movie every few weeks. Because the M.C.U. rewards expertise, it can baffle the casual viewer. If you saw “Wakanda Forever” and wondered what the hell Julia Louis-Dreyfus was doing in it, you likely missed her character’s début, in the Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” But a critical mass is on board. “The expression ‘preach to the choir’ often implies a certain niche-ness,” Christopher Markus, one of the writers of “Endgame,” said. “There was a very gratifying, unduplicatable sense with that movie that the choir was nearly global.”

The M.C.U. opens, improbably, on an arid Afghan landscape. A blast of AC/DC cues a Humvee containing Tony Stark, the playboy arms industrialist portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr. Within the first ten minutes of “Iron Man,” released in May, 2008, Tony gambles, defends the military-industrial complex, and beds a journalist. The M.C.U. is an augmented reality—a world resembling our own, overlaid by superheroes—but the adult tone of “Iron Man,” with its undercurrents of Bush-era geopolitics, didn’t last. “It’s very different from what Marvel is now,” the “Thor” screenwriter Zack Stentz observed. “It’s, like, ten degrees off of reality, rather than a talking raccoon with machine guns and magic and parallel universes.”

In other ways, “Iron Man” set a clear course for the franchise, with bursts of action punctuated by quippy, self-referential humor propelled by Downey’s motormouthed, largely improvised performance, reminiscent of a Vegas lounge act. In a post-credits scene, Samuel L. Jackson, as Nick Fury, shows up to tell Tony, “Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe.” “The Incredible Hulk,” released the following month, ends with Tony appearing at a bar to drop a hint about “putting a team together.” The model was in place: each movie would contain the germ of the next, and end by teasing a tantalizing mystery or crossover.

Thirty-odd films later, Marvel’s critics (and even some fans) groan at the formula. There’s the climactic C.G.I. slugfest, often pitting a good iron man against a bad iron man, or a good dragon against a bad dragon, or a good witch against a bad witch. There’s the self-referential shtick, the interchangeable villains. There are presumed-dead characters who reappear, as on a soap opera. Most plots boil down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy,” and the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the world, which come to feel like no stakes at all.

Within that framework, however, the M.C.U. allows for a range of stylistic variation. Branagh’s Shakespearean “Thor” gave way to Waititi’s zany sequels, rife with dick jokes and heavy metal. Jon Watts modelled his Spider-Man films on John Hughes’s teen dramas. For “Captain America: Winter Soldier,” the Russo brothers drew on Watergate-era thrillers such as “Three Days of the Condor.” And Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” movies, which are in a class of their own, are steeped in Afrofuturism and postcolonial politics.

You might picture arriving for your first day of work on a Marvel movie and being handed a leather-bound bible of character mythology. Instead, directors who are in the running for their first Marvel job are given a fifteen-or-so-page “discussion document,” distilled from corporate brainstorming retreats. Landing the job requires not slavish adherence to the document but a nifty approach to executing it. The movies are shot all over the world but edited in Burbank, on the same lot as Feige’s office. Each film’s creative team meets multiple times a week with Marvel’s upper management—until recently, a group known as the Trio, consisting of Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria Alonso. Filmmakers also receive notes from the Parliament, a group of senior creative executives who are each assigned to individual projects but review them all as a committee.

All this corporate machinery may sound oppressive, but Marvel collaborators tend to describe their experiences as surprisingly free-form and hands-off. One editor referred to Marvel’s oversight as a “pinkie on the steering wheel.” “There wasn’t anything dictated at all,” Joe Johnston, who directed the first Captain America film, told me. Erik Sommers, who co-wrote the Spider-Man trilogy, recalled that Marvel assistants had put together a document that explained the difference between a “universe” and a “dimension.” But otherwise, he said, “it’s not a giant diagram of preëxisting dots that need to be connected in a certain order.”

A few directors—Patty Jenkins, Edgar Wright—have quit Marvel projects, after battling for creative control. “The only times we’d run into problems is if we got a filmmaker who said, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and then showed up and wanted to do something completely different,” a former Marvel executive told me. “So then you hear people saying, ‘Kevin Feige came in, and he took over the process!’ But, if you know what the game plan is, you end up having a ton of creative freedom at Marvel, because we’re working inside the box.” Scorsese would shudder.

Filmmakers are often left in the dark about larger plans for the M.C.U. In Johnston’s film, Captain America’s best friend, Bucky, played by Sebastian Stan, falls off a mountain. He returns in later movies as the Winter Soldier, a major character, but, when Johnston directed the dramatic death scene, he had no knowledge of the character’s fate. “I assumed that was the end of Bucky,” he told me. When Sommers was working on “Spider-Man: Far from Home,” he and his writing partner, Chris McKenna, didn’t know what would happen in “Endgame”—which preceded “Far from Home” in M.C.U. chronology—except for the death of Tony Stark, which was referred to internally by the code name The Wedding.

Feige (who declined to be interviewed) has a reputation as an all-knowing Oz, but collaborators describe him as a comic-book savant who pops in and offers story fixes culled from his encyclopedic Marvel knowledge and delivered with a gee-whiz fanboy enthusiasm. “Anytime somebody pitches him something, he imagines himself in a theatre with a tub of popcorn,” Yost told me. A spitball session might result in tectonic maneuvering. When the Russos pushed to base the third Captain America movie on the Civil War comics—a crossover series involving a toybox’s worth of heroes—Feige worked for months to get the actors and the I.P. aligned. Anthony Russo recalled, “He opened up the door one day and poked his head in and said, ‘War is coming!’ ” But Feige’s zeal belies a cannier managerial skill. “He’s really good at getting what he wants, but at the same time making everybody feel like they got what they wanted,” the former executive said.

That particular superpower likely explains why M.C.U. filmmakers talk about their projects so personally, as if unloading to a shrink. When Jon Watts was hired to direct his first Spider-Man movie, he was best known for directing music videos and the Sundance thriller “Cop Car.” For “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” he had Peter Parker become Tony Stark’s anxious acolyte. “It’s about a kid who gets a huge opportunity and is really nervous that he’s going to screw it up,” Watts said. “That was me, I’m sure, externalizing my actual apprehension and nerves about making this jump from a really small independent movie to a two-hundred-million-dollar Marvel movie.”

It’s a cliché that superheroes are our modern Zeuses and Aphrodites, but Marvel movies tend to refract the preoccupations of a more earthbound subspecies: the middle-aged Hollywood male. The writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz met in the nineties, arguing over “Star Trek” in an online chat room, and worked together on the first Thor movie. Reflecting on Thor’s troubled relationship with his father, Stentz said, “I had an emotionally distant father, who often seemed impossible to win the approval of.” Miller keyed into Thor’s conflict with his brother Loki, the god of mischief. Six years after the movie, Miller’s therapist helped him realize that he’d been drawing on his “quietly contentious relationship” with his older brother.

M.C.U. movies are often metaphors for themselves. In “The Avengers,” the tense collaboration among superheroes with complementary powers and sizable egos resembles nothing so much as Hollywood filmmaking, with writers, directors, and producers wrangling for control. In “Captain America: Civil War,” the Avengers are divided over the issue of government oversight, a handy analogy for creativity under corporate supervision. As the M.C.U. goes on, the heroes become celebrities in their fictional world—in “Ragnarok,” a group of fangirls asks Thor for a selfie—just as they became celebrities in ours. “You’re watching them go through a version of the stresses you go through, but they’re exaggerated,” Christopher Markus said. “And you know almost all of them would rather be home. This goes back to Stan Lee, back to the comics—they had heroism largely thrust upon them by circumstance.”

In superhero tales, origin stories are crucial. The M.C.U. has several. The first begins in 1939, when the pulp-magazine publisher Martin Goodman launched Timely Comics, in Manhattan. Its first issue, Marvel Comics No. 1, featured stories of the Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner. In issue No. 7, a policewoman mentioned the Torch to Namor, revealing that the characters occupied the same fictional world. Not long afterward, Stanley Lieber, a young cousin of Goodman’s wife, joined Timely as an errand boy. He soon began writing the stories, under the pen name Stan Lee.

Lee was still an ocarina-playing teen-ager when he became Timely’s editor-in-chief, overseeing the company’s wartime golden age. Its breakout hero, Captain America, punched out Hitler and gained a wide following among G.I.s overseas. Unlike DC Comics, whose characters lived in Metropolis or in Gotham City, Marvel heroes lived among us; Namor scaled the Empire State Building, where Timely had offices on the fourteenth floor. Once the war ended, the superhero craze waned, and Congress scapegoated comic books for causing juvenile delinquency. In 1957, Lee had to lay off his entire staff.

Origin Story No. 2: a resurrection. In 1961, Goodman was playing golf with DC’s publisher and learned that its heroes would soon appear together in The Justice League of America. Goodman told Lee to copy the supergroup concept, and Lee and the artist Jack Kirby issued Fantastic Four No. 1. During its “silver age,” the renamed Marvel Comics rolled out a slew of new characters—Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man—becoming the hip underdog to DC. By 1965, circulation had tripled, to thirty-five million copies a year. Fellini was a fan. So were beatniks and college kids. As Sean Howe writes in “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,” “For twelve cents an issue, Marvel Comics delivered fascinatingly dysfunctional protagonists, literary flourishes, and eye-popping images to little kids, Ivy Leaguers, and hippies alike.” The Hulk had rage issues; the X-Men fought anti-mutant discrimination. Marvel’s kooky, neurotic cast overlapped in ways that grew Talmudic in complexity, and fans were eager to flaunt their arcane knowledge.

For a time, Lee oversaw the continuity of this ever-expanding universe, but his eye roamed to Hollywood, where he decamped in an attempt to bring Marvel to the screen. He had luck in television, with Saturday-morning cartoons and the live-action series “The Incredible Hulk,” which ran from 1977 to 1982. (CBS dropped a planned Human Torch show, worried that it would inspire kids to set themselves on fire.) But, even as the Superman movies proved that superheroes could work on the big screen, Marvel projects stalled. Cannon Pictures tied up the rights to Spider-Man. In the early eighties, there was buzz about Tom Selleck playing Doctor Strange. Nothing materialized. In 1986, Universal released the first movie based on a Marvel property, “Howard the Duck,” about a wisecracking alien duck who falls to Earth. It bombed.

Origin Story No. 3: another resurrection. In 1989, the billionaire Ron Perelman, notorious for his hostile takeover of Revlon, scooped up Marvel for $82.5 million, calling it a “mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property.” But he considered movies too risky. Instead, he padded out the entity, renamed Marvel Entertainment Group, with trading-card and sticker acquisitions. By the mid-nineties, Marvel’s famed “bullpen” of comic-book writers and artists had lost many of its star talents, and the bulk of the staff was laid off. Incensed by the declining quality, fans boycotted. Compounding Marvel’s financial woes, a Major League Baseball strike tanked the trading-card business. By the fourth quarter of 1996, Marvel was posting losses of four hundred million dollars. The stock price plummeted. Perelman filed for Chapter 11. Another billionaire, Carl Icahn, led a group of insurgent bondholders in an attempted takeover. During an agonizing year and a half in Delaware’s bankruptcy court, the two men battled for control of Marvel like Green Goblin versus the Vulture.

Neither won. The surprise victor was a reclusive Israeli entrepreneur named Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, whose company Toy Biz had an exclusive licensing deal with Marvel. Perlmutter had served in the Israeli military and kept a gun in his briefcase, which he would open conspicuously during negotiations. People he met in the U.S. mistakenly assumed that he had fought in the Six-Day War; this was repeated so often that even his close associates believed it. Perlmutter had come to America in his twenties and begun his career by standing at the gates of Jewish cemeteries in Brooklyn and charging mourners to have him deliver the Kaddish. He made millions buying up cheap surplus goods and distressed retailers, but his life style remained parsimonious to the point of eccentricity. He and his wife spent much of their time at a condo in Palm Beach, where they are said to still split a hot dog at Costco every Saturday. (His estimated worth: $3.9 billion.)

In the bankruptcy war between Perelman and Icahn, Perlmutter played—and enraged—both sides. When Icahn threatened to “pull down Toy Biz and bury you and Marvel with me,” Perlmutter faxed back four pages from the Book of Judges. (Samson: “Let me die with the Philistines!”) In 1998, the court approved Perlmutter’s restructuring plan, a leveraged buyout that would merge Marvel and Toy Biz. Like the pair of corporate raiders he’d bested, Perlmutter could hardly tell Iron Man from the Silver Surfer. But his business partner, Avi Arad, was a true believer. Arad, a fellow-Israeli who wore Harley-Davidson jackets, had made his name as a toy designer; his portfolio included a disappearing-ink gun and a doll that peed. Through Toy Biz, he had established himself as Marvel’s liaison to Hollywood, horning in on Stan Lee’s turf. During the bankruptcy proceedings, Arad gave an impassioned speech to the bankers to dissuade them from taking a deal from Icahn: “I feel certain that Spider-Man alone is worth a billion dollars. But now, at this crazy hour, at this juncture, you’re going to take three hundred and eighty million—whatever it is from Carl Icahn—for the whole thing? One thing is worth a billion! We have the X-Men. We have the Fantastic Four. They all can be movies.”

Now that Marvel was back from near-death and in need of cash, Arad set up an office in L.A. to license characters. In a short time, he succeeded where Lee had failed. He’d already sold the X-Men to Fox, which released its first X-Men film in 2000. He hired Feige, a young associate producer on the movie, to work for Marvel full time. The rights to Spider-Man, which had been scattered among six different entities, were miraculously regrouped and sold for ten million dollars per picture to Sony, which released the first Tobey Maguire film in 2002; it grossed more than eight hundred million dollars worldwide. Marvel was, at long last, in the moviemaking business. But, by parcelling its I.P. to studios all over town, the company had sacrificed an essential part of its DNA: its heroes couldn’t intermingle onscreen.

Consider another origin story, hitherto ignored. One late-summer weekend in 2003, a talent-agency executive named David Maisel was in his sweatpants, in the loft of his L.A. apartment. He had spent two years at the Endeavor agency, and he was contemplating his next move. But he didn’t want to remain an agent—he wanted to run a studio. “That’s when I thought, Hey, if I can get a movie I can believe in, and every movie after that one is a sequel or a quasi-sequel—the same characters show up—then it can go on forever,” he told me. “Because it’s not thirty new movies. It’s one movie and twenty-nine sequels. What we call a universe.” He eyed the Marvel comics on his bookshelves. This, Maisel claims, was the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Maisel, a slender and soft-spoken man, was telling me this story in the spot where the eureka moment took place. I had met him at his nearby office, a second apartment, festooned with Marvel posters, action figures, and director’s chairs. He wore cargo pants and a Silver Surfer hoodie. Without him, he said plainly, “the M.C.U. would never exist. It’s like a Thanos snap.” Near a plastic Thor hammer was a framed Times article from 2007, detailing Maisel’s plans for Marvel to release “10 self-financed films in the next five years.” Feige, Maisel noted, was not even mentioned. “Most people right now think Kevin started the studio,” he said. “They don’t know me at all.”

“David’s been sort of written out of the history of the studio, which I really think is weird,” John Turitzin, who until recently was Marvel Entertainment’s chief counsel, told me. “It was his brainchild.” Although Maisel came up alongside such Hollywood wheeler-dealers as Bryan Lourd, he has a gentle, almost childlike air. He is single and unextravagant, describing himself as “very influenced by Buddhist philosophy and simplicity.” He had spent the previous three years living with his elderly mother, who died eight weeks before we met. But he’s not without ego. “He thinks that he’s the smartest guy in the room all the time—just ask him,” a Marvel alumnus told me. “Because he’s really smart and myopic, he doesn’t read the room very well.” If Maisel were a Marvel character, he’d be a mysterious sorcerer in a cave, whispering to all who entered that he created the solar system.

Maisel grew up in Saratoga Springs, the son of a dentist and a Czechoslovakian-born housewife. “Marvel comics, and especially Iron Man, were my favorite things,” he recalled, sitting on a sofa with Iron Man throw pillows, his feet on a Spider-Man rug. Tony Stark had a cool suit and a captain-of-industry swagger, but “he had a frail heart.” In the eighties, Maisel tried to rally his classmates at Harvard Business School to “go buy Marvel,” but the idea didn’t get further than a brainstorm over beers. He worked for consulting firms, but after his sister died, of lupus, he realized that “life is precious” and moved to Hollywood, where he got a job with the superagent Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A. “He needed his token Harvard M.B.A. that he could bring with him to Warren Beatty’s house,” Maisel said. When Ovitz became the president of Disney—a tumultuous sixteen-month tenure—Maisel followed him and did strategic planning at ABC, which was owned by Disney and run by Bob Iger. “I learned, at Disney, the power of franchises,” Maisel recalled. He joined Endeavor at the beckoning of the firm’s partners Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell. In Hollywood, Maisel was living in the Tony Stark fast lane (he and Leonardo DiCaprio have taken their moms out together for Mother’s Day) when he determined that Marvel should finance its own intertwining movies. The problem was that he didn’t work at Marvel. Maisel flew to Palm Beach to pitch Perlmutter over lunch at Mar-a-Lago. (Donald Trump, a friend of Perlmutter, who later became one of his major political donors, came by to say hello. “I don’t remember what Trump said at the time, but it was nothing impressive,” Maisel recalled.) Perlmutter was skeptical; he saw movies primarily as an engine to sell merchandise. But that hadn’t always worked out. In 2000, Fox moved up the release date for “X-Men” by six months, leaving Marvel without action figures in stores. The former Marvel executive I spoke to recalled, “David had a sense that, if Marvel could own its own movies and control its destiny, it would change the course of cinema history.”

Perlmutter agreed to let Maisel try, appointing him president of Marvel Studios. But there were hurdles. When Maisel pitched the board of directors, they said no—or, at least, not as long as there was any financial risk. Maisel asked them to halt movie licensing for six months while he put together the money. Turitzin recalled that, at a meeting with Standard & Poor’s, to get a credit rating on the financing, “David made a comment about how Marvel was a compelling brand that people wanted to see on the screen, and the woman who was running the meeting for S. & P. spontaneously guffawed, because the idea seemed like such hubris.” Marvel would have to compete not only with DC’s Superman and Batman but also with its own best-known heroes, Spider-Man and the X-Men, which were licensed to other studios. “If I had gone there even eight months later, it would have been too late, because they were about to license Captain America and Thor,” Maisel said.

Like Nick Fury assembling the Avengers, Maisel lassoed back whichever characters he could. He recovered Black Widow from Lionsgate. He struck a deal that let Universal keep the right to distribute a Hulk movie but had a loophole allowing Marvel to use the Hulk as a secondary character. (This is why, even though the Hulk is all over the M.C.U., Marvel has never released a “Hulk 2.”) New Line, with pressure from Avi Arad, reverted its rights to Iron Man, hardly an A-list hero. To prove the viability of its characters, Marvel released direct-to-DVD animated Avengers movies. In the pre-recession boom times, Maisel secured five hundred and twenty-five million dollars—enough for four movies—in risk-free financing through Merrill Lynch. The collateral was the film rights to the characters, which, if the movies failed, would presumably be worthless anyway. “It was like a free loan,” Maisel said. “You go to a casino and get to keep the winnings. You don’t have to worry if you lose. The board had really no choice but to approve me making the new Marvel Studios.” Marvel convened focus groups of children, who were shown the available superheroes and asked which one they’d most want as a toy. The answer, surprisingly, was Iron Man.

At the Marvel Studios offices, now above a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills, a team of mostly Gen X men who had grown up on Marvel comics—including Feige and Avi Arad’s son, Ari—planned the first slate of movies, which would introduce the heroes one by one, and then unite them in “The Avengers.” (Anyone bemoaning Gen X’s supposed lack of cultural influence should look to the M.C.U.) “There was this general feeling of, like, Holy shit, they’re letting us do it,” the screenwriter Zak Penn recalled. Feige was a film-school graduate from New Jersey with a storage unit full of movie merch. “Kevin was the kind of guy,” the former executive recalled, “where you would find yourself at a Toys R Us for the release of the ‘Phantom Menace’ toys.” Maisel would debate Feige—whom he described as “Avi’s lackey” at that point—until 3 a.m. over, say, who would win in a fight between the Hulk and Thor. (Maisel leaned Thor: “Strength doesn’t always win.”) On a retreat in Palm Springs, Feige and a small group mapped out “Phase One” of the movies on whiteboards and sticky notes, deciding that it would revolve around the Tesseract, a glowing, all-powerful cube that looks like a design object from the Sharper Image.

Like the Avengers, the group was not immune to squabbling. Avi Arad, several people told me, was excited about the self-producing plan but then turned against it; he worried that they were taking on too much. Perlmutter was also waffling. “Ike wanted to cancel the whole thing. Avi didn’t like it. They realized there was pressure on them to deliver,” the former executive recalled. “It’s like when a kid is trying to date an older girl. All of a sudden, she says yes—well, now what? ‘I don’t know how to take her to prom! I don’t even have a suit!’ ”

A power struggle erupted between Maisel and Arad. “Being in a room with the two of them was like being in a room with a divorcing couple,” Turitzin recalled. In Maisel’s telling, Perlmutter was forced to choose between them, like an Old Testament patriarch. He sided with Maisel. Arad told me that he grew frustrated with how large the company had become and objected to a plan to expand into animated features. “I’m a one-man show. One-man show makes a lot of enemies,” he said. As for Maisel—whom he dismissed as an overambitious numbers guy, while ascribing the studio’s reinvention to his own salesmanship and connections—he said, “He was brilliant, but the way he deals with people turned out to be a problem, specifically for me.” Arad resigned in 2006, and he and his son set up their own production company, which continued to work on Sony’s Spider-Man films. Maisel became the chairman of Marvel Studios. He made Feige head of production.

To direct “Iron Man,” Marvel hired Jon Favreau, who was best known for the single-dude comedy “Swingers” and the Christmas hit “Elf.” The title role came down to Timothy Olyphant and Downey, who was in a career slump after years of drug arrests and rehab. “My board thought I was crazy to put the future of the company in the hands of an addict,” Maisel said. “I helped them understand how great he was for the role. We all had confidence that he was clean and would stay clean.” The movie, with a budget of a mere hundred and forty million dollars, relied less on spectacle than on Downey’s detached playfulness and his screwball-comedy chemistry with Paltrow. When Perlmutter visited the set, the producers had to hide the free snacks and drinks for the crew. Obsessively press-avoidant, he showed up at the première disguised in a hat and a fake mustache.

In early 2009, Maisel met with his former colleague Bob Iger, who had become the C.E.O. of Disney. Without consulting Perlmutter, Maisel suggested that Disney buy the newly ascendant Marvel. Perlmutter was assured that Disney would preserve Marvel’s corporate culture, as it had with Pixar, and that he would remain its chief executive. The acquisition was finalized on the last day of the year. Maisel resigned, fifty million dollars richer. “I wanted to leave and live a life—find a wife, which I still haven’t done,” he told me. He’d installed Feige as the studio’s president and figured that the franchise was in good hands, though he seems bewildered by how Feige’s contributions have eclipsed his own. “Kevin was a kid who I promoted, and I was his biggest fan,” Maisel said. “But Kevin wasn’t even in the room where it happened.” He’s currently planning a new universe of animated musicals based on Greek and Roman myths, starting with Justin Bieber as Cupid.

As we talked, Maisel pointed to a glass globe on his coffee table and asked me to cradle it in my palms for thirty seconds in silence. I obeyed. “How does it make you feel?” he asked. In truth, I felt a bit like Thanos, with the power to destroy worlds, but told him that I felt peaceful and protective. He nodded. Weeks earlier, Maisel had met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, at the invitation of Robert Thurman, the president of Tibet House U.S. and Uma’s father. He had brought an identical orb, which he’d bought at a gallery in upstate New York, and asked the Dalai Lama to hold it. Maisel pitched him an idea: His Holiness could pass the orb to another person, who could pass it to another, until all of humanity could feel its awe. “My globe is now his. It’s going to become a piece of art around the world,” Maisel beamed. “I feel the same way about Marvel.”

The M.C.U. arrived late in Marvel’s history, but it was well timed. By the late two-thousands, TV series like “Lost” had primed audiences to follow byzantine serial storytelling. And effects technology had finally caught up with the boundless, physics-defying action of the comics. It was one thing to make Superman fly using wires and a green screen; it was another to have Bruce Banner morph into the Hulk, or Tony Stark zoom around in his mechanized suit without it looking chintzy. With C.G.I., anything the comics had dreamed up was newly filmable.

With Arad and Maisel gone and Perlmutter incognito, Feige became the poster boy for Marvel’s meteoric success. But his executive style skewed adolescent. Feige had spent years on the wait list for Disneyland’s Club 33, a members-only executive lounge. “When we were purchased by the company, Kevin’s big thing was ‘Can I get to the top of the Club 33 list now?’ ” the former executive recalled. Because Feige had to sign off on nearly every creative decision, frustrated executives learned to e-mail him not with questions but with deadlines: “I’m constructing a set at three o’clock, unless you tell me otherwise.” At first, Feige declined a company driver, but he was eventually persuaded that his commute from Pacific Palisades to Burbank was better spent reading scripts. His unpretentious style endeared him to the Comic-Con crowd, as an Everyfan who represented all Marvel geeks’ dreams of getting the key to the toy chest.

The toy chest still belonged to Perlmutter, who continued to meddle from back East. Since taking over Marvel, he had imposed an obsessive frugality. He would fish paper clips out of the trash. “Instead of buying us actual furniture, he took a truckload of furniture that he had in a warehouse somewhere and shipped it to us,” the former executive recalled. “I remember having to unload a semi truck of furniture and opening drawers up and finding old sandwiches.” Once, the studio accidentally ordered pens with purple ink; Perlmutter refused to allow a replacement order, so for years Marvel paperwork was done in purple. The stinginess extended to movies. Chris Hemsworth was paid just a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to star in “Thor.” Terrence Howard, the highest-paid actor in “Iron Man,” was replaced in sequels by Don Cheadle; Perlmutter reportedly said that no one would notice, because Black people all look alike. (Perlmutter denies this.)

To help maintain his grip on the L.A. profit center, Perlmutter established the Marvel Creative Committee, a group of writers, editors, and allies from Marvel’s New York-based publishing wing. A High Court of Nerds didn’t sound like a bad idea, but the committee became the bane of the movie people. “It was basically a group that existed to tell the studio that they were doing everything wrong,” the former executive said, recalling that, on the first day of shooting “The Avengers,” the committee sent a twenty-six-page memo suggesting that the entire story be rewritten. “It was destructive madness.”

By 2015, the executive said, the feud “was almost like an East Coast–West Coast rap battle.” Feige was chafing under Perlmutter’s control, and, according to Iger, Perlmutter was “intent on firing” Feige. Iger blocked the ouster and restructured the chain of command, so that Feige would report directly to Disney’s studio chairman, Alan Horn. (Perlmutter says that he never tried to fire Feige but worried that Marvel’s reliance on him was “unduly risky” and urged Iger to recruit a backup.) The dreaded committee was disbanded, and Perlmutter was sidelined, but by then he had presided over the clearing of Marvel’s biggest roadblock: Sony’s hold on Spider-Man. For years, the two studios had bickered over the character like separated parents fighting over custody. Sony executives were used to getting screaming calls from Perlmutter about expenditures as small as free drinks at press junkets.

As the M.C.U. grew, Sony had announced a competing Spider-verse, but the studio was getting fan petitions to restore Spider-Man to Marvel, and its 2014 installment, “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” fell flat. Flailing, Sony contemplated a sequel that would send Spider-Man to a land of dinosaurs. Sony’s Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton finally flew to Palm Beach to strike a deal with Perlmutter and Feige: Sony would continue to release Spider-Man movies, but Feige would oversee them, and Peter Parker could, at long last, meet his friends in the M.C.U. The deal cut out Avi Arad, who calls it a “betrayal.” In an unsubtle nod, the first Spider-Man movie under the new arrangement was subtitled “Homecoming.”

As new characters appeared, the M.C.U. grew unwieldy. After Phase One climaxed with “The Avengers,” in 2012—the apotheosis of the Marvel style, with the wisecracking heroes fighting off an alien army and then celebrating over shawarma—Phase Two repeated the formula by adding more obscure characters, such as the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. Skeptics wondered whether Marvel was scraping the bottom of the superhero barrel, but the movies were hits. Phase Three brought in Doctor Strange and Black Panther, then mashed up the whole sprawling cast in “Avengers: Infinity War,” in which the craggy superbaddie Thanos, concerned about galactic overpopulation, wipes out half of all living things with a snap of his fingers. In truth, the M.C.U. was overpopulated and in need of a reset. “Avengers: Endgame” retired Chris Evans’s Captain America and killed off Downey’s Tony Stark, who had been the franchise’s driving personality.

As the comics had done in the sixties and seventies, the studio belatedly diversified its heroes. The 2014 Sony hack had turned up an e-mail from Perlmutter casting doubt on the profitability of female superheroes. (John Turitzin, a longtime Perlmutter ally, told me that Perlmutter had just been “parroting other people” and added, “He has a very good feel for financing, but he knows nothing about the characters.”) Loosed from Perlmutter’s grip, Marvel released a stand-alone movie for Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and added Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi. But, without Tony Stark leading the pack, the new phases felt directionless. One potential successor, Black Panther, was eliminated by the death of Chadwick Boseman, in 2020.

Nonetheless, the content spigot opened wider still. In 2021, Phase Four kicked off the “Multiverse Saga,” which will unspool across phases at least through 2026. The multiverse may be a philosophical concept—that parallel universes contain infinite possible realities—but it’s better understood as an organizing principle for colliding strands of I.P. Disney’s purchase of Twentieth Century Fox brought the promise of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four finally joining the M.C.U. At Feige’s suggestion, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” used the multiverse idea to bring M.C.U. heroes (Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange) together with characters from Sony’s previous iterations of “Spider-Man” (Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus). The premise was both trippy fan service and blatant corporate synergy. “You have this historic deal between Sony and Marvel, and they want things from each other,” the “No Way Home” co-writer Chris McKenna said. “There’s going to be cross-pollination of characters, so that both corporations are feeling like they’re getting something out of this relationship.”

This year has been tumultuous for Marvel. In February, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the first film in Phase Five, opened to a lukewarm box office and some of the worst reviews in Marvel’s history. (“Busy, noisy and thoroughly uninspired,” Manohla Dargis wrote in the Times.) The visual effects were singled out as muddy and generic, adding to a perception that Marvel is spewing out more content than it can handle. A single film may have upward of three thousand effects shots, and Marvel’s strategy of tapping directors from sitcoms or Sundance means that the person in charge has little experience handling big action scenes. The past few years have brought reports of burnout and discontent in the VFX industry. Because Marvel, its biggest client, is known for its penny-pinching, VFX firms underbid one another for work, leaving projects understaffed and underfunded. Effects artists have been seen crying at their desks during eighty-hour weeks, tortured by Marvel’s immovable deadlines, last-minute rewrites, and too-many-cooks indecision over, say, Thanos’s exact shade of purple.

I spoke to several VFX artists, under the condition of anonymity. (Marvel is said to blackball firms that push back.) Some said that Marvel stress was a symptom of larger problems in the effects industry, which is decentralized across the globe, owing to tax incentives, and clearly in need of labor protections. “Marvel is the easy punching bag,” one said. But another told me, “They have a tendency to change their minds pretty late, and in effects that’s where we take all the heat.” He pointed out one scene, in “Endgame,” in which the Avengers go back in time. During production, the actors wore placeholder motion-capture suits, which were then gussied up with C.G.I. “They could have just worn the costumes, and it would have been a billion times easier,” the VFX artist said.

A month after “Quantumania” opened, Disney abruptly fired Victoria Alonso, Marvel’s long-serving head of postproduction and a member of the Trio, fuelling speculation that she was responsible—or being scapegoated—for the VFX issues. Disney said that Alonso had violated her contract by promoting an Oscar-nominated feature that she had produced for another studio. She declined to comment, but a source close to the matter told a different story: Alonso, a gay Latina, had been barred from the “Wakanda Forever” press tour after she gave a speech accepting an award from GLAAD which criticized Disney’s handling of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. When her team was then asked to edit out rainbow flags and other pride symbols from a San Francisco street scene in “Quantumania” for certain release territories, she refused, and the outside film she’d produced was used as a pretext to fire her. (“It’s not credible,” the former executive I spoke to said, of this narrative. “We’ve been doing whatever was asked of us by China, Russia, and the Middle East for twenty years.”) After her lawyer threatened “serious consequences,” Alonso reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Disney.

“Quantumania” set up a new supervillain, Kang, played by Jonathan Majors, who would recur throughout the Multiverse Saga. In March, Majors was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and strangulation, after an incident with his girlfriend. He denied wrongdoing, but the scandal has handed Marvel a dilemma. Two weeks later, Disney terminated Perlmutter as Marvel’s chairman. Perlmutter, who remains one of Disney’s largest individual shareholders, had recently antagonized Iger by pushing (unsuccessfully) for his friend Nelson Peltz to get a seat on Disney’s board. Perlmutter told the Wall Street Journal that he’d been fired for, among other things, aggressive pursuit of cost-cutting. Iger cited “redundancy.”

All this followed Iger’s comments, at an investor conference, that Disney would reduce its content, including endless Marvel retreads. “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance?” he said. With all the oversaturation, palace intrigue, and brand deterioration, the M.C.U. juggernaut finally appeared to be showing cracks. The release, last month, of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”—which grossed twenty-eight million dollars less on its opening weekend than the previous installment—did little to dispel the feeling that Marvel fatigue is real, and that Feige is spread too thin for the avalanche of content. “The one downside to Marvel is that it all bottlenecks at Kevin,” the former executive said. “I think everyone’s agreeing that this is not the optimal amount of stuff.” Scientists predict that our own universe will begin to contract in the next hundred million years; the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having reached its outer limits, may be subject to a similar law of nature.

On a Thursday last November, I went to the Regal Union Square multiplex, in Manhattan, to see “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” on opening night. It was playing on twelve of seventeen screens, but even that wasn’t enough to prop up a dying theatrical model: weeks later, Regal’s parent company, which had filed for bankruptcy, revealed plans to close the Union Square location, along with thirty-eight others.

For now, though, the escalators filled up with Marvel fans. Jacob, an N.Y.U. student, had seen his first Marvel movie, “The Avengers,” for a friend’s tenth birthday. His favorite character was the Scarlet Witch, he said, because she was “constantly getting things thrown at her and overcoming them.” Richard, an aspiring game designer, in a Marvel T-shirt and hipster glasses, had been reading the comics since he was five. “I still feel very protective of those characters,” he said. His favorite M.C.U. hero was Captain America, because of the character’s commitment to his principles (“a douchey thing to say”). Richard, who has a Mexican dad and a Black stepmom, called Marvel “one of the most powerful engines we have to teach people about difference.” After the film, he emerged from the theatre shaken by how it had connected the grief over Boseman’s Black Panther with postcolonial trauma: “A lot of us who support sci-fi and genre storytelling have suffered deep cultural losses that we’re still learning how to understand.”

Coming up the escalators was Tim, a twenty-five-year-old financial analyst and Marvel “aficionado.” His favorite character was Ant-Man, because “we’re both really short,” he said. After seeing “Endgame,” he’d caught up on the M.C.U. on Disney+. “Honestly, now that we work from home, I watch during the day,” he said. When I asked him to name the last movie he’d seen in a theatre, he said “Thor: Love and Thunder.” “I only go to the theatres for Marvel,” he admitted. “Even if I just go to Marvel movies, it’s three or four a year. So I’m, like, O.K., that’s enough.” ♦