
At the time, I was running a company plus getting the movies made, and in all fairness, on the job learning of the live-action business. We licensed studios, we participated in revenues. It took a while to unite the rights, and in those days, those rights were, I would say, they were sloppily put together, and Marvel, at the time, tended to sell the properties for anything they can get. THE BEGINNING OF MARVEL STUDIOSĪrad: When we got involved with Marvel, Marvel had a very low self-esteem. It wasn’t necessarily easy to go back that far as Downey put it: “That’s the dumb thing about history, if you’re talking about something that has its origins more than 12 minutes ago, you’re already coloring it with your ego and your story.” But, as best they could, the team laid out the humble beginnings of Iron Man, and its impact on everything that came after.įor even more from Vanity Fair’s exclusive Marvel cover story and shoot, click here. Nine years and 16 movies since that first Marvel Studios effort, Feige and the rest of the team behind the first Iron Man-director Jon Favreau, star Robert Downey Jr., and the studio’s original head, Avi Arad-couldn’t help but think back on the film that started it all.

“There were a lot of points where the whole thing could have fallen apart, of course, starting with Iron Man,” Kevin Feige said while sitting down to reflect on a decade of filmmaking from Marvel Studios for Vanity Fair’s Holiday issue.
