Let me tell you a little-known story from the set of the first good Marvel movies of the 2000's:
On the set of Bryan Singer's X-Men, there was a young, upcoming intern from Marvel. The name of that intern was Kevin Feige, and he worked under a producer named Lauren Shuler Donner.
Now, Kevin was a bright and passionate filmmaker sandwiched into a dull and passionless industry. He pushed hard, going against multiple dissenting voices, for X-Men to remain consistent to its source material. And in his attempts, he coerced an irritated hairstylist on the set to use the classic hairdo we see Wolverine eventually wear throughout the X-Men series.
Rather than whatever God-awful alternative the stylist had in mind.
In fact, such was this intern's acumen for comic-based films, that the young Feige was secretly one of the biggest factors behind the success of that entire franchise.
He was that good.
Now, some people at the various companies Feige worked with saw potential in him. Like the then-head of Marvel Studios, Avi Arad.
He appreciated Feige's passion and dedication to the source material. Thus (and this is an important point here) he begun sending Feige to the sets of every Marvel film being produced, in order to advise the filmmakers.
However, most people in Hollywood didn't care for or even like Feige at all. Especially the heads of the corporations whose film sets he was posted to.
Sony, Fox, Lionsgate, etc; most of them couldn't care less about what Feige - a man with actual passion and knowledge about the characters in the films they thoughtlessly churned out - had to say.
Heck, they didn't give a rat's ass about what anyone had to say. All they cared about was their bottom line. And if remaining true to the source material seemed like it may affect that bottom line (and believe me, it often did) they chucked that idea out the window.
And because Marvel had since sold off their rights to actually using these characters, Feige (who was an employee of Marvel Studios) couldn't do anything about it but complain.
That's why we got the Fant4stic Flop,
The Nicolas Cage Ghost Rider movies,
That atrocious Daredevil Movie (and what I can only presume was a spin-off, with Elektra),
And whatever the hell Deadpool was in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
But Kevin Fiege would not be put down by those money-hungry bureaucrats. Some time in the mid-2000's, he proposed one of the grandest, loftiest schemes in film history.
The MCU.
It was a risky, capital-intensive, venture. And had he been saddled under a greedy production company like Sony or Fox, he likely would have never been allowed to proceed with it.
But unlike the greedy corporations, making money wasn't the first thing on Feige's mind when creating this plan.
No, the MCU was very much spurred from Feige's passion.
After watching first-hand, for several years, as the corporations ruthlessly butchered his favourite characters, Feige (the same intern, who at this point was prominent enough to propose concepts and have Marvel stop and listen to them) decided to step up and act.
He gathered the few characters that Marvel hadn't sold off their rights to, and decided to make movies for them. Properly, and with respect to the source content.
And the rest, as we say, is history.
So what stopped Marvel movies from being good? The goddamn production companies!
These people literally had a walking repository of knowledge and understanding of the genre standing right next to them on set as they churned out one trashy film after the other.
But they somehow decided that butchering their characters and releasing half-baked stories would provide more money. So they threw all of his advice to the wind. Not even minding that he was an actual fan of the comics they were supposed to at least pretend they cared about!
So to summarise, corporate greed, an unwillingness to take risks, and an unwillingness to listen to advice stopped Marvel films from being good.
Picture Source Wikipedia
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