While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had some struggles of late, the franchise is still the king of the cinema. The concept of bringing comic book continuity into film has become an idea so successful that many have tried, and most have failed, to copy it. It’s all come a long way from the original Iron Man. That first film was a massive hit that started it all, though back then not everybody was sure it would work.
With the Deadpool & Wolverine release date approaching and the film expected to be a massive box office hit, it’s hard to imagine a time when anybody would question Marvel’s plans. Back in the beginning, however, people very much did. Speaking with Deadline, Kevin Feige remembers bringing Iron Man to SDCC had the media questioning whether Marvel could be successful without the rights to its most popular characters. Feige still remembers one particularly brutal headline, saying…
When we were going to Comic-Con in 2007, when we were bringing Iron Man there with Jon Favreau, one media outlet did a story that read 'Marvel Calls Out the ‘C’ Team.' People thought, ‘Well, are you going to be able to make anything of these characters that aren’t the major players if you don’t have Spider-Man or X-Men?’ People thought Marvel had nothing else. And we thought, 'We have 8,567 other things.' The audience wants to see a great piece of entertainment.
It’s a pretty brutal comment, to say the least, but it’s an understandable one at the time. The story has been told that Sony was once offered the rights to the entire Marvel catalog for a song, but the studio only wanted Spider-Man because it didn't think any of the other characters were important enough.
Iron Man and Captain America were known, but even among comic book fans they were not nearly as popular as Spider-Man or the X-Men. And among the general public the difference in popularity was even more stark. Marvel certainly had a lot of characters to pull from, but that didn’t mean movie fans would be interested.
But as Kevin Feige points out, there was already a precedent for a largely unknown comic book character to become a massive hit movie. Marvel had evidence that both popular and lesser-known characters could make for successful films, so they knew that the new plan had a chance. Feige continued…
I said for a long time that the one-two punch for Marvel, pre-dating me, was Blade and then X-Men. Blade was a character that nobody knew from the comics, or very few people knew. It wasn’t advertised as being from Marvel Comics. X-Men was the No. 1 bestselling comic for the 15 years before the movie came out. Both of them did extremely well, and that instilled in us the notion that it is less about how many issues did you sell or how famous was the animated show or the live-action series in the ’70s, but how engaging can you make the character, and how much of a new experience of a world can you bring to cinemas with that character. And that’s what we tried to do with Iron Man, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy.
While not every MCU movie has been a massive hit, what’s clear now is that the character is not the determining factor in what makes a hit. Any Marvel character can have a fantastic movie made about them. Blade was so successful originally that fans are now eagerly anticipating an upcoming Marvel movie based on the vampire hunter. Some of Marvel's lesser-known characters have become their biggest hits. There arguably isn't even a Marvel "C Team" anymore.
