5 Curiosities about the Marvel Cinematic Universe

5 Curiosities about the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The first Marvel Studios film
The first OFFICIAL Marvel Studios film is, of course, Iron Man. However, the first film produced with the involvement of Marvel's film division was Blade: The Vampire Hunter, back in 1998.
The film was produced by New Line Cinema, which had purchased the rights to Blade. Interestingly, New Line also owned the rights to an… Iron Man film!
However, as New Line produced Blade films until 2004, it lost the rights to Iron Man in 2005.

The profit of ‘Marvel Studios’ pre-MCU
To give you an idea of ​​how things worked at the time when Marvel and producer Avi Arad only licensed their films to other studios, here's a curious fact about Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.
The first two films in the Tobey Maguire trilogy, produced by Sony, grossed more than 1 and a half billion dollars at the box office!
But Marvel Studios only made 62 million dollars in the middle of all this. Very little when we see the numbers that Marvel makes today or any studio that actually develops its films.
But it's worth remembering that we're talking about a Marvel that was recovering after the bankruptcy and difficulties of the 90s.

The MCU came from a loan
The decision to start producing and distributing its own films was an important turning point for Marvel Studios. But it was not something easy or completely available to the company.
In 2005, the studio took out a loan of 525 million dollars from the bank Merrill Lynch, to produce 10 films over 8 years.
If they didn't fulfill their obligations, the consequence would be HUGE. See below:

Marvel could lose the rights to the Avengers
If Merrill Lynch failed, Marvel Studios would lose the cinematographic rights to characters such as the Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow), Ant-Man, Black Panther and all the heroes who would win projects in the MCU.

Guardians of the Galaxy didn't start with James Gunn
James Gunn was immortalized for the great work he did in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. However, the team's arrival in the MCU did not happen because of the director.
Prior to Gunn's hiring as director and co-writer in 2012, Nicole Perlman was part of Marvel Studios' writing program.
In 2009, Nicole chose to write a script based on the comics of the current Guardians of the Galaxy lineup. In 2011, with Marvel more willing to make the film, they asked her to write a new draft of the script.
With Gunn's arrival, Nicole's script was reworked and remodeled according to the director's creative decisions. And there is a controversy at the end of it all.
As a friend of Nicole's alleges that she fought and insisted that her co-writing credits not be deleted. Something that, supposedly, was what Gunn wanted.
The screenwriter's friend also claimed that large elements of the 2014 film came from Nicole, such as Peter Quill's passion for old music and his backstory.