I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. So, sometimes when I'm not reading books, which, to be clear, I'm doing all the time, but sometimes when I'm not reading, occasionally, I will watch a movie. And occasionally, when I do watch a movie, it'll be a superhero movie. Once Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008, I've seen 25 of the 32 movies released by Marvel Studios. And now, I have a kid in the house.
I've seen some of them multiple times. On this week's episode, I speak with Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez, two of the authors, along with Gavin Edwards, of the new book, MCU, The Rain of Marvel Studios. In that book, they document the rise of Marvel from an indie studio to a behemoth that has changed modern moviemaking. Let's turn to that conversation now. Joanna and Dave, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much.
So you write by the end of 2022, when we finished writing this book, Marvel had made 30 feature films with a worldwide gross of over 26 billion dollars, considered as a whole that output was easily the most successful film series of all time. Two movies have since been released, but the point remains, the biggest series of all times. It's impressive, but why is it important and why was it important enough to write a book about? It's going to sound like a salesmanship, I know.
But when we thought about this book and about who we were writing for, we definitely of course wanted to write for the Marvel fans. That is a part of this book. If you love Marvel films, there are a lot of stories about the Marvel films you love in this book that we hope you'll enjoy, but also we wanted to write a book for Marvel's skeptics. We wanted to write a book for people maybe who fell in love with Marvel once upon a time, but are maybe slightly falling out of love with it.
And actually, even for Marvel, agnostic, we wanted to write a book because no matter how you feel about the Marvel films, this decade plus of filmmaking where Marvel was dominating Hollywood, it happened. No matter how you feel about it, it happened. And so decades from now, centuries of now, as people are studying film history, they're going to study the Marvel era, the Marvel chapter.
And we wanted to fully explore that in a way that would make sense for people who are trying to understand how did this kind of storytelling take over Hollywood? Why did we need this kind of storytelling now? And when we spoke to John Favreau, director of the first Iron Man movie, he likes to bring up the era of the Westerns in film history and how, once upon a time, Westerns don't be nominated, all the films and the television, you know, gun smoke, etc., all the television you were consuming.
And that era ended. People still make westerns, but not the same way they made it forward. So perhaps this is the superhero chapter, which actually, if we are at the tail end of it, and your mileage may vary if we are, but if we are, was a much shorter chapter than the Western chapter in Hollywood history.
It's the reign of Marvel Studios and not necessarily the rise of Marvel Studios because the rise would indicate that it's still going up and up, but the reign is, this is something that I don't think is going to be replicable in the future. Even if you try really hard to have interconnected cinematic universe, you're not going to have the access to the international markets you did. We're not going to have the streaming wars hitting when they did anymore.
We're in more of a barbenhire, my era, I think, in terms of where people, how people interact with films. So it is a singular time in cinematic history that we got to cover and get all the details in. Now the two of you wrote this book with a third writer, Gavin Edwards. Talk to me a little bit about how you all split up the reporting and the writing between three of you. Who did what and how did the process work?
Yeah, I will say that if you take it on a very superficial level, Dave is our research person. I am the interviewer and then Gavin weaves it all together in this wonderful tapestry that we like to say because he did that, I like to say the pages turn themselves because that's just me complimented Gavin, which is true. Gavin has written 12 books. Dave and I have written no books and so we were working on this project for a couple years together.
We had all this information that we had gathered via research, via interviews and when it came time to putting it together and something that flowed beautifully, that's where we found some challenges. I have been writers for a long time, podcasters for a long time, but the art of the book is something completely different and new for us. So Gavin came on and really just helped the whole thing coalesce.
At the end of it, when we were turning on actual chapters, those are things we all worked on together. Gavin would put down the draft. I would read and make my notes. Dave would read and make his notes. There are definitely all of us are in there, but if you're worried about the tone jumping all over the place, I think it is one smooth, even tone and that's something we're really lucky that we were all able to work together in that way.
You know that you're on the Book of View podcast and our audience loves books. I imagine they love lots of things, but I was wondering, and this is a challenge, perhaps. If one of you could very briefly talk about the key moments that led to Marvel Studios being this dominant force in pop culture, I'll kick it off. You start in 2008, which is like the key year in superhero movie. You had the first Iron Man movie, which is not ever guaranteed to succeed even though it did.
You had the Dark Knight, which is this Christopher Nolan DC movie that proved to some that superhero movies can play in the realm of art. And then after Iron Man, you have 31 other movies, but this was never faded to be as successful as it was. How did we get here? I would actually roll it back a little bit to 2004. David Mazeau worked with Marvel Studios. He makes a deal that we cover very early on in our book while talking to Ike Pro-Mutter who runs Marvel Entertainment at the time.
They're having lunch at Mar-a-Lago. Trump stops by to say hi because he and Ike Pro-Mutter are really close. And David's like, why are you not? Why are you leaving money on the table, letting other people make your movies and just getting a licensing fee? So David's brilliant plan is to basically mortgage some of Marvel's characters to a bank in order to get hundreds of millions of dollars to start their own studio to produce their movies.
And when Iron Man hits, they basically are able to pay that all back after one movie. Well, I mean, Iron Man and Hulk sort of came out a month for each other. So they both contributed to being so they will pay off that loan. And that's the immediate success that allows them to pivot not just from we need to make good on this loan, but we can have these movies interconnect like the Marvel Comics and lead to something in 2012, which is the Avengers. Let's look at all these characters.
We're going to introduce them to you. They're all going to get trilogies and in between each one of these installments, you're going to get an Avengers movie. And we see once 2012 happens, the industry sort of races to try to replicate that. They can't. That is what leads to Avengers Infinity War and Avengers Endgame where this all peaks. And for two years, every Marvel movie that's coming out as a billion dollar grosser movie, that's the super simplified arc.
But the big arc is like from licensing out to Fox and Sony to make X-Men and Spider-Man movies to like, why don't we do this ourselves and why don't we do it like the comics, but also make sure that they're extremely good movies. Every movie needs a villain. And it seems like the villain of this book is Ike Pro-Mutter and his Marvel Creative Committee. They were located in New York City. They were separate from Marvel Studios, which was located on the West Coast.
And because of the various parts of the Disney deal in particular, they were done. Ike Pro-Mutter had a ton of power when it came to making decisions that would affect the Marvel movies. Those interests seemed to be ones that the people on the West Coast were not necessarily interested in. Can you talk to me a little bit about that tension in that struggle between these two sides of the organization?
Every story does mean a villain, but what I love about Pro-Mutter and our story is that the arc he is on is from Hero to villain, right? Because when he shows up at the beginning of the book, he rescues Marvel from bankruptcy. So if you are a comics fan in that time period when Marvel went bankrupt, and Ike Pro-Mutter comes in and rescues Marvel from being sold off as scraps, then you are like Ike Pro-Mutter hero of the comics industry for saving Marvel Studios.
But once you move into the movie making era, Pro-Mutter perhaps motivated by the financial insecurities that come from rescuing a company from bankruptcy is very careful with his dollars and cents going forward. So even when Marvel is making billion dollar movies, we've got lots of interviews from people talking about how the office chairs were collapsing underneath them or they weren't allowed to buy tissue paper.
They had to use the napkins that they brought in from lunch to blow their noses or one of my favorite stories, that Shane Black, the director of Iron Man 3, wonderfully sardonic screenwriter. When he grabbed a bagel from the Marvel Kitchens, he left a dollar because that was just like a joke about what was going on at the Marvel offices at the time.
So all of that is true, but I think even beyond that sort of punny pinching mentality was this idea that Ike Pro-Mutter comes from the world of toys.
Ike Pro-Mutter and his lieutenant Avi Arad, who were the ones, Avi was out in Hollywood selling out licensing off the character, so that's where you get like Ben Aff, like a Daredevil or JetGarden Elector or whatever, that's where Nick Cage and Ghostwriter, like that's the Avi Arad era of Marvel movies, but they're making these movies with toys in mind, or as one Marvel person put it to us very evocatively in the book, Pushing Plastic. They're trying to push plastic.
And so in pursuit of pushing plastic, that's how you get the decisions as to who gets to be a hero in your story. According to Ike Pro-Mutter, white, musly, guys in their 20s, that's what sells, that's what pushes plastic. And so that's who gets to be heroes.
And that's a major reason why we wrote the book, because above and beyond our Marvel fandom, above and beyond Marvel's place in Hollywood history, I think it's important to know who's controlling these stories and who decides who gets to be a hero in these very potent stories that have a huge influence, especially on the kids who watch them. I think that is an important thing to examine what the minds behind this are. And it comes down to the bottom line, to dollars, to merchandise.
And that is a really intriguingly sticky part of the Marvel story. So the Hollywood major film, when done well, is sort of an intersection of economics or business, craft and art, hopefully. And depending on the Marvel movie, you look at some of those factors are higher than others, but they're all involved. The thing to me, and hearing the two of you talk about this, it really was one of the inciting incidents, was this idea that you don't just make a sequel.
Every movie is a sequel, because by dipping into comic books, where all characters interact with one another, you can actually do that movies in a way that's never been done before. But it seems like that idea was the one that unlocked the whole thing. The franchise idea, honestly, to hang on to who you ask, various people have taken credit for that idea over the years.
So it's hard to nail down exactly who came up with the idea, but I'm inclined to give it a sort of partial, partially to David Maisel, partially to Kevin Feige. I would say that, Maisel, specifically, this idea of the business-minded approach to storytelling, or how every time you make a sequel, because Maisel is a business genius, a contract genius, so studying the box office genius, every time you make a sequel, it will make as much as if not more than the previous film.
So there's a guarantee of some kind when you're talking about sequel films. And this is something that moviegoers know that Hollywood has uncovered, because it seems like everything is a sequel now. It picks our got into the sequel business. So that interlocking story is, of course, the most potent juice at the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, what felt innovative, disruptive, and different of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But it is also what is coming to bite them a bit right now, I would say, because now you mentioned over 30 films, if you're trying to get someone into the MCU now, they have what feels like a lot of homework to catch up on before they can jump into the story. So what felt like first, this incredible lore now feels like a bit of a burden when you're talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The idea is sound, and I agree it comes through with like a David Maisel.
He talks about it very intelligently as someone who's into the dollars and cents and where you could pull off budgets by selling foreign rights and everything. But Kevin Feige being a guy who likes good movies before he's a guy who likes Marvel comics.
And so the fact that he's would be the type of person that would like skip his prom to go see back to the future again and then spend the night thinking about how he would sequelize back to the future meant that his mind was already in this point about like how do you tell a good story.
So the idea that every movie is a sequel makes monetary sense, but the creative idea that every movie is a sequel is still a creative decision at its base and being able to balance that with the difficulties of production is like the Kevin Feige magic.
I'd love for you to talk to me a little bit more about Kevin Feige because one thing I thought despite all the people that you're at about being involved in various decisions along the way, it does feel like he at a certain point takes over drives the vision realizes that he has to be in some way the frontman for this idea of the Cinematic Universe.
So in front of audiences, he's the guy we're in the baseball cap and the blazer with the t-shirt, but behind the scenes, he's also the person who's working on working with talent and figuring out which are the characters that we're going to bring out and what is the plan for this phase and that phase has a lot of work for one guy. How did this man become the one that was driving so much of the success of the studio? Dave and he's a broker, so Disney deal and then decides to leave.
And when I asked him why I said, you went out, I was tired. That was like, sure, but Kevin apparently had a lot more energy to keep going on his chapter at Marvel. And so Feige, Kevin Feige wanted to be a director. That's who he wanted to be when he is the guy kept applying to USC Film School after getting rejected and rejected because he wanted to make films through interning with Richard Donner and Richard Donner's wife Lauren Shulidonner, who's a very accomplished producer.
He decided, wait, maybe I want to be a producer because Lauren's always working and Richard Donner, famed director, Richard Donner is only sometimes working and I want to be always working. And so he rolls into this producer and then executive slash producer role. But what's really interesting about the Marvel method that we discovered is this idea that Kevin Feige, at least for a time before we got really inundated with so many Marvel projects.
I'll talk about that in a second, but for a time, the Marvel method was higher director, tell that director to go make their movie, bring me back the pieces when he was a bring back the pieces to California. After you've gone to Atlanta and our Carolina, we remember shot this movie, come bring me back the pieces. We'll look at it. I'll tell you what's missing. This relationship is missing. That actually be missing. And then we'll go and we'll shoot more and we'll finish the film.
You could call it a reshoot, you could call it additional photography, but there's always a post Kevin Feige looks at the pieces step in a Marvel project. And in that way, he is not only the head of a studio, not only a creative producer, he's also a somewhat of a de facto director of a lot of these films. And as you say, there's a lot of work for one man.
And so when you start ramping up productions on Marvel projects, which is what Disney demanded when they launched Disney Plus, and when you start getting more and more, we go from two to three movies a year to more movies a year, more TV shows, that Marvel method that requires it passed through the eye of the needle of one creative mind cannot sustain.
And that's where you find us currently in the Marvel, what I always call the Marvel wobble, because that idea of scalability can scale up a single creative genius. And it seems like that. We'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm here with Joe Anorappanson and Dave Gonzalez, two of the authors of MCU, The Rain of Marvel Studios.
I was going to save this to the end, but what is the Marvel wobble describe it for some of our listeners who may not have watched a TV series on Disney Plus? The current Marvel movies were in phase five, which is really not important because what actually is important is the box office returns are lesser. We haven't had a billion dollar Marvel movie since Spider-Man, No Way Home.
The Disney Plus streaming series have been received poorly by critics in some cases, whether or not that's deserved is a matter of criticism. But yeah, it's completely different from like Infinity War, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and game like that run was just it seemed like they couldn't stop making hits.
And they had great plans going forward, but obviously the pandemic and the push by both Bob Eiger and Bob Chapeck to get more content on Disney Plus because at that point, they thought it was a subscriber game. So why not just flood open the flood gates and that's going to get people coming back if there's a new Marvel thing every couple of weeks put so much strain on the studio. Not everything could go through Kevin Feige.
And I think Marvel obviously is eventually going to have a succession problem if we drive Kevin Feige into the ground. Is anybody going to be willing to step up for that or is Kevin Feige trapped in this for the rest of his life that I think is the wobble that we're finding right now? You two have worked at Jason's to the internet fan ecosystem, whether it's through journalistic outlets or the various podcasts that the two of you have appeared on or host or co-host.
I'm curious as to how you think fans and the way because of the internet, they're able to make their pleasures or displeasures known very quickly how they have affected the decisions of this billion dollar company. When we talk about this a lot, we talk about what we like to call the fandom menace, right? Because a lot of it comes out of the Star Wars pals. I love the phrase no one hates the Star Wars movie more than a Star Wars fan.
But like the Marvel fandom studio relationship is so interesting, especially running in parallel to what Lucasfilm is doing at the same time under the same, like Disney umbrella. Lucasfilm is so reactive to fan criticism. You only have to look at the swerve for the last Jedi of the Rises Skywalker to see how much they were willing to have their leashes pulled by the loud minority on the internet. Marvel is far less reactive to this kind of thing.
Partially because as you read in the book, given the struggle for power between Marvel East Coast and Marvel West Coast being Kevin Feige and his filmmakers at Marvel Studios did not have full control over what they could do. Hey, do all of your superheroes need to be played by white guys named Chris? Could we have some people who are some women, some people of color in these leading roles?
And five young filmmakers are like, yeah, we would like that too, but that's we are being blocked from getting to do that. But they couldn't say that publicly. But there was very much sort of, we will get to it when we can. And I think you see Marvel, I don't know what's going to happen going forward because obviously their relationship with their fans is post end game is different than their relationship with their fans pre-end game, whereas Dave said they could do no wrong.
Now people feel like they could do some wrong, right? But so we'll see how reactive they are going forward. But I think when you look at something as pandemic-disappointed as dizzy buys Fox, now Marvel owns the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. And ever since that happened, every single Comic Con, the fans are practically chanting and salivating the audience where are the X-Men, where are the Fantastic Four, where are the X-Men, where are the Fantastic Four.
And Kevin Feige says, I'll give it to you when we have the best version of it and the best idea of it to give to you. And so I think that patience, that sort of I want to present to you the best version of this thing I know you want. But I'm not going to, you're saying, give me now, I'm not going to give it to you now. I'm going to give it to you when it's good.
And that I think is that sort of fortitude in the face of that demand, I think gives you an indication that Marvel is still not being buffeted by the wins of fandom. That's my sense. But again, we'll see if that changes going forward. I am very curious because it only happened a few years ago. And it seems like you really changed in some ways the direction of this corporations plan.
Chadwick Boseman played Black Panther and he was supposed to be in some ways one of the future linchpin's of the Marvel franchise. And he passed away at a very young age to the surprise of all.
And now Marvel as it's going forward finds itself not only because of that, but because of many of the things that you referenced in this weird period where it's not clear to people what the plan or the direction is going forward when it feels like one of the things that was always reliable about Marvel's, you knew that they were building to something. And so anticipation would build over years and years. And maybe that is part of the reason why you have a movie like Avengers Endgame.
Talk to me a little bit about how Chadwick Boseman's passing has affected decision-making. And whether or not we're actually moving into a period where, be it Marvel movies or superhero movies in general, find themselves floundering a bit. I think they were also betting on Brie Larson, his Captain Marvel and Tom Holland as Spider-Man to help lead forward the Marvel universe with a challah and Chadwick Boseman.
But Captain Marvel, the first movie, Brie Larson, because of some very valid comments about who should be reviewing movies and maybe it doesn't always need to be middle-aged white guys, got some sort of fan backlash. And then Tom Holland was a victim of Sony still owning the Spider-Man property. So every time you have a Spider-Man movie, it becomes a Marvel Studios co-production.
And that's the sort of thing that up until very recently, I pro-mother was like, I didn't build the studio to do this. I built the studio to get all the money. So a lot of those things were undercut, even though the actors were very strong. And I think the performances were extremely well cast. So now we're trying to look for that new icon. And I think they have some great ones. And like I'm on Valani is Miss Marvel.
And to a certain extent, Paul Rudd has tried to step in to the multiverse center in that man. But none of them have been hitting with audiences the way that Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man have. So they're building a B team and teaching us to love them. And that's taking longer. But then again, it took us a long time to come around on Thor. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet. It's just the, they came out of Phase 3 with some really solid heroes.
And they haven't been able to make any of those come back to the same box office returns. And so we're sort of looking to who's going to be the new leaders of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Joanna, is there a way in which Dave was talking about the storytelling choices that are being made and the ways in which economics and rights issues and the actual people playing these characters all play into this phase that we're in?
But do you have any thoughts on what it might be from an audience perspective? Because one of the things that strikes me and you spoke before about having to watch, let me take a step back. I have a nine year old and we've watched almost all of these movies together. But he knew before we even started watching any of these movies, there was a movie called End Game.
And he wanted to see that movie and I said, I'm sorry, we literally have to watch these 20 something movies before I don't know what to tell you. But we're going to be doing this for like six months. So we did and we watched it and it's great. But now we're in a moment where it's here is this Disney plus TV show. And here is this TV show. You have to watch these eight episodes in order to understand this multi-versal storytelling. And it just seems overwhelming in a way that it wasn't before.
When even before it was overwhelming. And I'm curious as to whether or not that might be playing into audience appetite for more stories. Of course it is. And I think that when Bob Eiger talks about Marvel and Lucasfilm and Pixar and all their little acquisitions, little massive acquisitions, he talks about the brand, right? The Marvel brand.
And what it means for audiences to sit down in front of a film and see that Marvel logo come up and then they feel like they know what they're getting, right? Same was true. I think once upon a time of Lucasfilm, that Lucasfilm logo go and you go, okay, I know what's coming. And that's less and less true. The more erotic the quality has been of the TV shows and the films where people no longer feel like a Marvel movie is guaranteed to entertain or delight them.
And to your point, that idea of you never want your brand to feel like homework or a burden to people. That's the opposite of what you want for a brand. So first things first, Eiger when he came back and replaced Bob Shapek at Disney, what's hilarious about that transition of power is when Eiger left, his mandate was more and more content for Disney+. Eiger takes over when Shapek was briefly in charge of Disney, not very popular reign.
Eiger comes back and he's, who told everyone to make so much content? Turn on all the tabs here. We're going to turn some of this off, right? So Eiger's, I don't know who decided to do that. Definitely wasn't me before I left. And we're going to start making fewer films and fewer TV shows and they're all going to be great. So they already know that they need to pull back. They're retrenching, right? They're pushing projects.
We found out via a Hollywood reporter report last week that they're just scrapping some things they've already shot like Daredevil just to make sure that when they put something out now that has the Marvel Studios logo in front of it, it is going to be quality. And some people are excited about it. So even if there is some homework, there's homework towards a goal that you're excited about.
So if your goal is end game, the biggest movie in the world, then you're like, like it's a down to six months of homework to get there, right? But if your goal is secret invasion, a Disney plus show that came out earlier this year, that everyone's like, that's not what I would have done with Samuel Jackson Olivia Colman, then the homework feels more burdensome. And so I think that's part of it. Another thing is we don't know exactly what they're going to do in the future.
But if you are a comic book fan, there is a storyline called Secret Wars, which is a title, a subtitled currently affixed to one of their future of Enderst Movies. And in that storyline, there is a potentiality to start.
Collarian characters off the board who aren't working and perhaps bring back old characters that we liked that are missing and really drilled down on the things that are really hitting with people and getting rid of all that extra continuity that feels like a burdensome homework to people and get us back down to the core, can't miss must see TV era of Marvel. So the Marvel Cinematic Universe is unprecedented, unparalleled and maybe as Dave said earlier, will never be able to replicate it.
It's a business success, par excellence, cultural movement. But I think for those, I say this is someone who's seen many of these movies multiple times, for those who think that this company has had a negative effect on Hollywood. They're not talking about the quality of the films, they're not even talking about the ambition of the storytelling.
They're talking about the ways in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made it to some seem like it's impossible to make any other kind of movie in Hollywood because they've been so profitable and in the major studios of which there are only five or six really want to we've been in a blockbuster era for a very long time.
So you lay out very well how this has been incredible business success, but what do you think some of the lasting effects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be on Hollywood, on culture, on any of that stuff? I think there's a couple of reactions going on right now to the Marvel, Wobble or Demise how we prefer. There's people are saying it's just a wobble and they'll rebound those people exist.
There's people who are tearing their hair out because they're distraught that their favorite stories are inconsistent quality right now. And there's the people who are gleefully dancing on what they've presumed to be Marvel's grave, right? Because they believe that the demise of Marvel means the return of the mid-level movie and going back to what Hollywood was before Marvel took over. But what I will say is that it's not Marvel really necessarily that changed the industry.
As a lover of the mid-level movie and as someone who would love a mid-level scroll girl movie or mid-level quote-unquote movies for adults is what people think are missing from the culture because of Marvel. I love all of those movies that people think are missing. You just find them on streamers now where you find them as TV series instead of films.
But I think it's incorrect to blame Marvel for what's going on in the larger film industry because you can blame people just not wanting to leave their houses. This was a pre-pandemic situation where everyone's my home entertainment system is incredible. Why would I go to the movies anymore? You can, there's just a lot of things going on that have changed the way that people watch things. So to get to the theater in the first place feels like it needs to be a visual effects extra I'm against.
Otherwise why am I leaving the comfort of my home? As someone who loves the theater and loves to see every movie in the theater, I'm a huge advocate. I'm going to the theater no matter how big or small the movie is, but that is not where the larger culture has shifted. But I don't think that's Marvel leading the culture. I think that's Marvel following where the culture was already leading.
But I think it reinforces that and it's going to be a lasting impact that the way we watch movies has forever changed and the way that we think about long-term emotional investment in characters because I think this is a big reason why some people say I would rather watch eight hours of a bingeable TV show than three hours or three and a half hours of Linus Martin Scorsese movie.
I wouldn't agree with that choice, but they might feel like I have a more emotional connection to these characters that I've been with for eight hours or multiple seasons of a TV show than anyone can give me in a couple hours in a future film. And what Marvel cracked is we're going to try to give you that emotional investment over many movies like there are co-optic some TV mentality into their movie making.
When Thor shows up his first couple movies, okay Thor's here, or when Captain America first shows up in the first Avenger, most people think that first Captain America movie is fine. But then eventually Steve Rogers becomes one of the most important characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because that just takes time, investment, falling in love, all of that stuff and that's just a different way to enjoy story and I think that's something that Marvel will always have his fingerprints on.
Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez, thank you both for coming on the Book Review podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Gilbert. That was my conversation with Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez about their new book, MCU The Rain of Marvel Studios. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening. Thank you.