Marvel Studios Boss Cans Its Creative Committee
It looks as though Marvel Studios is in the midst of a drastic overhaul… as studio boss Kevin Feige gets rid of its creative committee.
According to Devin Faraci at Birth.Movies.Death, the recent shake-up at Marvel Studios goes a lot further than we thought.
“Not only has there been a shake-up, I believe that the Creative Committee is actually finished altogether, although some version of it may continue to live on at Marvel TV, which remains under Ike’s control.”
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Of course, this comes just days after it was revealed that Kevin Feige had been given more power at the studio – bypassing CEO Ike Perlmutter altogether, instead answering directly to Disney.
But what was the creative committee?
“It was a group of people who would give notes and thoughts on Marvel productions as they made their way from script to screen,” explained Faraci. “Some of the guys on the committee included Alan Fine, who came with Perlmutter to Marvel through Toy Biz, Brian Michael Bendis, who is a prolific Marvel Comics writer, Dan Buckley, publisher of Marvel Comics and Joe Quesada, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and the current Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Enterprises.”
It’s said that their input has helped to shape Marvel’s film output over the last decade… but while that may sound like a good thing in theory, it seems the committee may have gotten in the way of real progress at the studio.
“Over the years I’ve heard many stories of the Creative Committee giving notes that are pedestrian, motivated by ‘save the cat’ story logic and sometimes a drag on creativity. One Marvel creative talked to me about battles with the Creative Committee where they focused on details of nit-picky science that ignored the general tone of the script itself. The notes that drove Edgar Wright off Ant-Man came from the Creative Committee.”
Although ‘Ant-Man’ went on to be a commercial and critical success, it did so without its original writer/director, Edgar Wright… and after he’d spent the last decade refining his film, that came as a bit of a blow to everyone.
And that’s just the start of the committee’s problems.
“What’s more, the Creative Committee was often very tardy with their notes,” he explained, “making movie development a much slower process. All of the Committee members have other, very important jobs, so you understand why that would be the case, but it was a pain for filmmakers. And that’s before taking into account the political divisions within Marvel that also created friction with the Creative Committee.”
It’s no secret that Marvel Studios likes to have a hand in the way its films are made. After all, ‘Thor: The Dark World’ director Alan Taylor famously said that working with Marvel was a ‘particularly wrenching’ experience.
And now that details of the creative committee are revealed, it’s understandable.
But with the committee being disbanded (as far as the movies are concerned), perhaps Marvel Studios faces a new dawn.
“It won’t be evident on Captain America: Civil War or maybe Doctor Strange, which is already deep in pre-production, but everything coming afterwards could reflect a new energy at Marvel. Key creative decisions are now being made by Kevin Feige, Louis D'Esposito and Victoria Alonso alone. Any drag or difficulty caused by the Creative Committee is over, and any skinflint choices and bizarre decisions made by Ike are out of the way.”
(It’s understood that it was Ike Perlmutter’s decision to can any Black Widow merchandise due to his opinion that girl toys don’t sell…)
Will it make a huge difference? For now, we have to wait and see. But with Kevin Feige at the helm, I get the feeling we’re going to see a far more creative Marvel Studios.
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Picture Credit: Marvel
