It is one of the most successful entertainment brands in the world, and is behind blockbuster franchises such as Spiderman, X-Men, and The Avengers.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the history of Marvel, from its inception to its current status as a cinematic powerhouse.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marvel.
[00:00:25] It is one of the most successful entertainment brands in the world, and is behind SpiderMan, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and more.
[00:00:35] But, the journey to get there, like a Marvel movie, was all but simple, and in this episode we are going to tell this story.
[00:00:44] It involves Hitler, patriotism, the creative process, a slightly tenuous reference to a 19th century Frenchman, near bankruptcy and more, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:57] I should also say that this episode is a member request, so Rita, if you are listening, thank you very much for this excellent suggestion.
[00:01:06] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The Marvel Universe.
[00:01:12] In 1832, an overweight French 33-year-old had an idea.
[00:01:19] He had been writing books for the best part of a decade, but they had not received the critical success he had hoped for. To be precise, one critic had referred to them as “curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad."
[00:01:37] But all was about to change with the idea that the man had been struck by.
[00:01:44] He would create a huge fictional world based in 19th century France. He would write stories about the characters that existed in this world. Each book would focus on the trials and tribulations of a different character, but there would be some overlap - the main character in one book might be a minor character in another, and so on.
[00:02:07] He ran to his sister’s apartment, declaring “I’m about to become a genius”, and he got to work.
[00:02:15] In the next 18 years he would go on to write almost 100 books about this fictional world, before dropping over and dying from a heart attack aged 51.
[00:02:27] The man was Honoré de Balzac, and his fictional world was La Comédie Humaine, the Human Comedy.
[00:02:36] Fast forward a few hundred years and anyone going to any cinema, almost anywhere in the world, cannot but be bombarded with adverts to dive into another magical fictional world, The Marvel Universe, a world in which characters overlap, fight, work together, interact with each other and influence each other’s stories.
[00:03:02] This, however, is about where the parallels stop.
[00:03:07] Honoré de Balzac died poor and in debt; The Marvel Universe has raked in $30 billion from its movies alone.
[00:03:17] Balzac painted a powerful picture of a wide range of contemporary French society; the Marvel Universe deals with a fantasy world of superhumans and supervillains.
[00:03:30] Balzac’s works are critically acclaimed, with novelists such as Emile Zola and Charles Dickens crediting Balzac as being an influence on their work; Marvel, on the other hand, was called monotonous by Christian Bale, “not cinema” by Martin Scorsese, and “boring as shit” by Ridley Scott.
[00:03:54] Some directors might not like them, but it is undeniable that Marvel films are incredibly popular and successful, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise grossing more than twice the Star Wars franchise at the box office.
[00:04:10] So, how did it all get started?
[00:04:13] Well, we have to go back to the period just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
[00:04:20] Superman was created in 1938, and followed shortly after by Batman, both in comic book form.
[00:04:29] Both of these were a raging success, and a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman had seen this and decided, hey, I think I’d like a slice of that action.
[00:04:42] He started a company called Timely Publications, and in August of 1939 the company published its first comic book, called Marvel Comics, which starred a character called “The Human Torch”.
[00:04:58] Like Superman and Batman before it, it was an almost-immediate success, selling 80,000 copies in its first edition. It was a strong enough sign to Goodman, and he decided to go all-in, hiring full-time illustrators and artists to come up with stories and write the comic books.
[00:05:20] The Human Torch, their first character, was popular but this would be dwarfed by their 1940 creation, Captain America.
[00:05:30] Up until then, the characters in Marvel comics had fought imaginary fictional supervillains, but the villain that Captain America was to be first pitted against was no fictional supervillain; he was none other than the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
[00:05:49] Indeed, if you look at the first Captain America comic, the front has Captain America, clad in the stars and stripes of the United States of America, punching Hitler hard in the face.
[00:06:03] Now, this choice of villain was a clever one for several reasons.
[00:06:09] Firstly, the creators of Captain America were staunch interventionists, they wanted America to get involved in the fight against Hitler, so this was their way of putting forward their political views to their audience.
[00:06:24] And secondly, it did wonders for magazine sales, as this Captain America character tapped into existing patriotic feelings.
[00:06:34] Long story short, it was a runaway success, and Captain America is to this day a character used in many Marvel movies.
[00:06:45] The circulation of Marvel comic books continued to grow in the 1940s and 1950s, but initially, the characters in the comics were relatively one dimensional, or two dimensional if we’re being generous. Plots were simple: hero beats villain.
[00:07:05] As an American audience grew to tire of this kind of formula, Martin Goodman realised that something needed to change. He gave one of his writers, Stan Lee, a brief to create a new group of superheroes.
[00:07:20] Stan Lee was planning on quitting the comic book world anyway, so he figured, why not, I’ll give it a shot. And it would be this decision, and Stan Lee’s execution of it, that would be an instrumental step in setting the course for the success that Marvel is today.
[00:07:41] Stan Lee’s genius was two-fold.
[00:07:45] Firstly, he created characters that were superhuman, they had powers that humans do not have, but they were also very human in terms of their flaws and personal problems. They argued with each other, they were jealous of each other, they were human in their feelings, they had depth.
[00:08:06] The Fantastic Four were the first of these, but they would be followed by Spider Man and Hulk, all deeply flawed characters with human as well as superhuman characteristics.
[00:08:20] Not only did this make for better and more engaging stories, it also meant that the comic books could be enjoyed and bought by adults as well as children.
[00:08:31] And secondly, Stan Lee created an entirely new method of writing comic books, and I think this is particularly interesting.
[00:08:42] Previously, the scriptwriter would create the entire dialogue, saying what happened and who said it, then they would pass the script to the illustrator, who would draw it.
[00:08:56] Stan Lee decided to do things differently.
[00:09:00] Instead, he would think of an outline, a rough idea for the story, then he would give this to the artist and the artist would draw out the scene. Lee would then take the finished drawings and add the narrative afterwards.
[00:09:19] This way it not only allowed the artists to be properly involved in the creative process, but it was also a lot quicker to create a comic book.
[00:09:30] This all ushered in a new era for Marvel, the so-called “Silver Age” that went on throughout the 1960s and saw the creation of many of Marvel’s most popular characters.
[00:09:43] Now, we need to jump forward a bit to the 1990s, as it’s here that we find things not going so well for Marvel.
[00:09:53] Marvel had, until then, made money primarily from comic book sales and merchandise.
[00:10:00] Sure, people bought comic books to read, enjoy and throw away, or leave in a pile in a corner of the room. But there was another category of comic book buyer, someone who bought not one, not two, but perhaps 10 or 20 editions of a comic book, and kept them in pristine condition with the expressed intention of selling them later for a profit.
[00:10:27] See, comic book companies like Marvel had done a very good job at encouraging Americans that comic books could be great investments, because early editions could be sold later on for a profit. Indeed, there had been some cases where early editions of now popular Marvel comics had been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:10:50] But people soon enough got wise to the fact that if 100,000 people or 200,000 people all held the same supposedly “valuable first edition” of a comic book, well it really wasn’t that valuable.
[00:11:06] And in the mid 1990s, this comic book bubble had started to burst. Sales were dropping, and Marvel executives hypothesised that it was because their sales had been artificially inflated by people buying 20 copies of a comic book as an investment; now that same person bought one copy, or perhaps none at all.
[00:11:31] Combined with this, Marvel had made some poor investment decisions and as a result it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1996.
[00:11:42] It was, kind of like a Marvel story, the low point, where it seems like there is no hope.
[00:11:49] The money had all gone, financial speculators were ready to pounce, and there seemed like there was no escape; the company was going to die.
[00:12:00] But, like a Marvel story again, Marvel managed to rise from the ashes.
[00:12:07] The rise was, if we can continue the phoenix rising from the ashes analogy, slow.
[00:12:14] The rise started with the complicated but important issue of intellectual property. Marvel had created, as you’ve heard, some incredibly popular comic book characters: Spider Man, Captain America, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and so on.
[00:12:32] Given the collapse in the comic book industry in the mid 1990s, Marvel knew that it had to diversify, and one clear option here was movies.
[00:12:43] But Marvel was a comic book company, not a movie company.
[00:12:49] The new boss of Marvel, an Israeli called Avi Arad, sold the rights to some of its popular characters to movie studios, who would then make the movies.
[00:13:00] And these movies were a big success. Blade, in 1998, X-Men in 2000, and the Spider-Man movies from 2002 to 2007.
[00:13:12] They were a big success at the box office, but Marvel reportedly saw very little money from them.
[00:13:21] According to one report, Blade made $70 million dollars at the box office, but Marvel only saw $25,000 of that.
[00:13:32] Marvel was, essentially, renting the use of its characters to movie studios, who would then make vast amounts of money by using them in their movies.
[00:13:42] And things might have continued this way had it not been for a 41-year-old talent agent called David Maisel.
[00:13:51] In 2003, he pitched the boss of Marvel Studios, Avi Arad, on an idea.
[00:13:58] Like Balzac back in 1830, Maisel had this idea of a huge interconnected universe of Marvel characters. Instead of Marvel creating the characters and then licensing them to a movie studio, Marvel would be the movie studio.
[00:14:17] Arad had been looking for a solution anyway, and he was sold. He made Maisel the boss of a new unit of Marvel, called Marvel Studios, and told him to get to work.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, actually making a Marvel movie takes quite some time; it took a couple of years for Maisel to raise the $525 million from a bank to invest in the movies, and then he actually needed to make the movie itself.
[00:14:48] First, they needed to choose which movie to make, or rather, which character to make a movie out of. There were a lot to choose from, and according to one report the way they chose was by doing a load of focus groups with children and asking them which Marvel character they wanted to play with. The answer came back: Ironman.
[00:15:11] The children had spoken and the first movie to be made was indeed Ironman which came out in 2008. It was, as you may remember, an immediate hit, making $100 million dollars in its opening weekend and just shy of $600 million dollars at the box office.
[00:15:32] Marvel knew that it was on to something. It had this deep roster of characters that it could draw from, it could make movies about any of them, and could make hundreds of millions of dollars each time.
[00:15:45] And so it was that just after a year after releasing Ironman, the company was bought by Disney for $4 billion dollars. It's quite the turnaround for a company that had declared itself bankrupt a matter of 13 years before.
[00:16:01] And Disney certainly seems pretty happy with its decision to buy Marvel. It paid $4 billion but by the end of 2022 it had already made a reported $22.5 billion.
[00:16:15] Sure, Disney has been accused of milking the Marvel franchise for everything it is worth, putting out the same old tired and formulaic plotlines year after year, but the reality is that people can still be relied on to queue up at the cinema and buy tickets.
[00:16:35] And, whether you are a fan or not, you have to admit that Marvel is very efficient at making movies that lots of people like. It has a huge fanbase, which it is very good at engaging with, it makes a particular type of film that is reassuringly familiar to its fans, it knows what works and what doesn’t.
[00:16:57] But, how long can this continue, that is what critics are asking, and what people within Marvel and Disney have admitted to asking themselves.
[00:17:07] In July of 2023, the boss of Disney, Bob Iger, admitted that he wants to make fewer Marvel movies, saying that there were too many, the audience was getting tired of them, and the strategy he wants to follow is to have fewer, better movies, rather than releasing three every year, which Marvel has been doing since 2017.
[00:17:31] Now, like them or loathe them, the Marvel movies have had a huge impact on the world of cinema over the past 15 years or so.
[00:17:40] It has dominated the box office, sold tens of billions of dollars worth of tickets, and introduced a new generation of children to a bunch of superheroes that might never have left the pages of a comic book.
[00:17:53] It might not be Balzac, but Marvel has provided entertainment and amusement to hundreds of millions of people, and, if Disney has got anything to do with it, will continue to provide entertainment for many years to come.
[00:18:10] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marvel Universe.
[00:18:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:19] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:18:23] Are you a Marvel fan? If so, what is the thing you love most about the movies?
[00:18:29] Or are you certainly not a fan like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese? And if so, why not?
[00:18:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marvel.
[00:00:25] It is one of the most successful entertainment brands in the world, and is behind SpiderMan, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and more.
[00:00:35] But, the journey to get there, like a Marvel movie, was all but simple, and in this episode we are going to tell this story.
[00:00:44] It involves Hitler, patriotism, the creative process, a slightly tenuous reference to a 19th century Frenchman, near bankruptcy and more, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:57] I should also say that this episode is a member request, so Rita, if you are listening, thank you very much for this excellent suggestion.
[00:01:06] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The Marvel Universe.
[00:01:12] In 1832, an overweight French 33-year-old had an idea.
[00:01:19] He had been writing books for the best part of a decade, but they had not received the critical success he had hoped for. To be precise, one critic had referred to them as “curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad."
[00:01:37] But all was about to change with the idea that the man had been struck by.
[00:01:44] He would create a huge fictional world based in 19th century France. He would write stories about the characters that existed in this world. Each book would focus on the trials and tribulations of a different character, but there would be some overlap - the main character in one book might be a minor character in another, and so on.
[00:02:07] He ran to his sister’s apartment, declaring “I’m about to become a genius”, and he got to work.
[00:02:15] In the next 18 years he would go on to write almost 100 books about this fictional world, before dropping over and dying from a heart attack aged 51.
[00:02:27] The man was Honoré de Balzac, and his fictional world was La Comédie Humaine, the Human Comedy.
[00:02:36] Fast forward a few hundred years and anyone going to any cinema, almost anywhere in the world, cannot but be bombarded with adverts to dive into another magical fictional world, The Marvel Universe, a world in which characters overlap, fight, work together, interact with each other and influence each other’s stories.
[00:03:02] This, however, is about where the parallels stop.
[00:03:07] Honoré de Balzac died poor and in debt; The Marvel Universe has raked in $30 billion from its movies alone.
[00:03:17] Balzac painted a powerful picture of a wide range of contemporary French society; the Marvel Universe deals with a fantasy world of superhumans and supervillains.
[00:03:30] Balzac’s works are critically acclaimed, with novelists such as Emile Zola and Charles Dickens crediting Balzac as being an influence on their work; Marvel, on the other hand, was called monotonous by Christian Bale, “not cinema” by Martin Scorsese, and “boring as shit” by Ridley Scott.
[00:03:54] Some directors might not like them, but it is undeniable that Marvel films are incredibly popular and successful, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise grossing more than twice the Star Wars franchise at the box office.
[00:04:10] So, how did it all get started?
[00:04:13] Well, we have to go back to the period just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
[00:04:20] Superman was created in 1938, and followed shortly after by Batman, both in comic book form.
[00:04:29] Both of these were a raging success, and a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman had seen this and decided, hey, I think I’d like a slice of that action.
[00:04:42] He started a company called Timely Publications, and in August of 1939 the company published its first comic book, called Marvel Comics, which starred a character called “The Human Torch”.
[00:04:58] Like Superman and Batman before it, it was an almost-immediate success, selling 80,000 copies in its first edition. It was a strong enough sign to Goodman, and he decided to go all-in, hiring full-time illustrators and artists to come up with stories and write the comic books.
[00:05:20] The Human Torch, their first character, was popular but this would be dwarfed by their 1940 creation, Captain America.
[00:05:30] Up until then, the characters in Marvel comics had fought imaginary fictional supervillains, but the villain that Captain America was to be first pitted against was no fictional supervillain; he was none other than the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
[00:05:49] Indeed, if you look at the first Captain America comic, the front has Captain America, clad in the stars and stripes of the United States of America, punching Hitler hard in the face.
[00:06:03] Now, this choice of villain was a clever one for several reasons.
[00:06:09] Firstly, the creators of Captain America were staunch interventionists, they wanted America to get involved in the fight against Hitler, so this was their way of putting forward their political views to their audience.
[00:06:24] And secondly, it did wonders for magazine sales, as this Captain America character tapped into existing patriotic feelings.
[00:06:34] Long story short, it was a runaway success, and Captain America is to this day a character used in many Marvel movies.
[00:06:45] The circulation of Marvel comic books continued to grow in the 1940s and 1950s, but initially, the characters in the comics were relatively one dimensional, or two dimensional if we’re being generous. Plots were simple: hero beats villain.
[00:07:05] As an American audience grew to tire of this kind of formula, Martin Goodman realised that something needed to change. He gave one of his writers, Stan Lee, a brief to create a new group of superheroes.
[00:07:20] Stan Lee was planning on quitting the comic book world anyway, so he figured, why not, I’ll give it a shot. And it would be this decision, and Stan Lee’s execution of it, that would be an instrumental step in setting the course for the success that Marvel is today.
[00:07:41] Stan Lee’s genius was two-fold.
[00:07:45] Firstly, he created characters that were superhuman, they had powers that humans do not have, but they were also very human in terms of their flaws and personal problems. They argued with each other, they were jealous of each other, they were human in their feelings, they had depth.
[00:08:06] The Fantastic Four were the first of these, but they would be followed by Spider Man and Hulk, all deeply flawed characters with human as well as superhuman characteristics.
[00:08:20] Not only did this make for better and more engaging stories, it also meant that the comic books could be enjoyed and bought by adults as well as children.
[00:08:31] And secondly, Stan Lee created an entirely new method of writing comic books, and I think this is particularly interesting.
[00:08:42] Previously, the scriptwriter would create the entire dialogue, saying what happened and who said it, then they would pass the script to the illustrator, who would draw it.
[00:08:56] Stan Lee decided to do things differently.
[00:09:00] Instead, he would think of an outline, a rough idea for the story, then he would give this to the artist and the artist would draw out the scene. Lee would then take the finished drawings and add the narrative afterwards.
[00:09:19] This way it not only allowed the artists to be properly involved in the creative process, but it was also a lot quicker to create a comic book.
[00:09:30] This all ushered in a new era for Marvel, the so-called “Silver Age” that went on throughout the 1960s and saw the creation of many of Marvel’s most popular characters.
[00:09:43] Now, we need to jump forward a bit to the 1990s, as it’s here that we find things not going so well for Marvel.
[00:09:53] Marvel had, until then, made money primarily from comic book sales and merchandise.
[00:10:00] Sure, people bought comic books to read, enjoy and throw away, or leave in a pile in a corner of the room. But there was another category of comic book buyer, someone who bought not one, not two, but perhaps 10 or 20 editions of a comic book, and kept them in pristine condition with the expressed intention of selling them later for a profit.
[00:10:27] See, comic book companies like Marvel had done a very good job at encouraging Americans that comic books could be great investments, because early editions could be sold later on for a profit. Indeed, there had been some cases where early editions of now popular Marvel comics had been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:10:50] But people soon enough got wise to the fact that if 100,000 people or 200,000 people all held the same supposedly “valuable first edition” of a comic book, well it really wasn’t that valuable.
[00:11:06] And in the mid 1990s, this comic book bubble had started to burst. Sales were dropping, and Marvel executives hypothesised that it was because their sales had been artificially inflated by people buying 20 copies of a comic book as an investment; now that same person bought one copy, or perhaps none at all.
[00:11:31] Combined with this, Marvel had made some poor investment decisions and as a result it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1996.
[00:11:42] It was, kind of like a Marvel story, the low point, where it seems like there is no hope.
[00:11:49] The money had all gone, financial speculators were ready to pounce, and there seemed like there was no escape; the company was going to die.
[00:12:00] But, like a Marvel story again, Marvel managed to rise from the ashes.
[00:12:07] The rise was, if we can continue the phoenix rising from the ashes analogy, slow.
[00:12:14] The rise started with the complicated but important issue of intellectual property. Marvel had created, as you’ve heard, some incredibly popular comic book characters: Spider Man, Captain America, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and so on.
[00:12:32] Given the collapse in the comic book industry in the mid 1990s, Marvel knew that it had to diversify, and one clear option here was movies.
[00:12:43] But Marvel was a comic book company, not a movie company.
[00:12:49] The new boss of Marvel, an Israeli called Avi Arad, sold the rights to some of its popular characters to movie studios, who would then make the movies.
[00:13:00] And these movies were a big success. Blade, in 1998, X-Men in 2000, and the Spider-Man movies from 2002 to 2007.
[00:13:12] They were a big success at the box office, but Marvel reportedly saw very little money from them.
[00:13:21] According to one report, Blade made $70 million dollars at the box office, but Marvel only saw $25,000 of that.
[00:13:32] Marvel was, essentially, renting the use of its characters to movie studios, who would then make vast amounts of money by using them in their movies.
[00:13:42] And things might have continued this way had it not been for a 41-year-old talent agent called David Maisel.
[00:13:51] In 2003, he pitched the boss of Marvel Studios, Avi Arad, on an idea.
[00:13:58] Like Balzac back in 1830, Maisel had this idea of a huge interconnected universe of Marvel characters. Instead of Marvel creating the characters and then licensing them to a movie studio, Marvel would be the movie studio.
[00:14:17] Arad had been looking for a solution anyway, and he was sold. He made Maisel the boss of a new unit of Marvel, called Marvel Studios, and told him to get to work.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, actually making a Marvel movie takes quite some time; it took a couple of years for Maisel to raise the $525 million from a bank to invest in the movies, and then he actually needed to make the movie itself.
[00:14:48] First, they needed to choose which movie to make, or rather, which character to make a movie out of. There were a lot to choose from, and according to one report the way they chose was by doing a load of focus groups with children and asking them which Marvel character they wanted to play with. The answer came back: Ironman.
[00:15:11] The children had spoken and the first movie to be made was indeed Ironman which came out in 2008. It was, as you may remember, an immediate hit, making $100 million dollars in its opening weekend and just shy of $600 million dollars at the box office.
[00:15:32] Marvel knew that it was on to something. It had this deep roster of characters that it could draw from, it could make movies about any of them, and could make hundreds of millions of dollars each time.
[00:15:45] And so it was that just after a year after releasing Ironman, the company was bought by Disney for $4 billion dollars. It's quite the turnaround for a company that had declared itself bankrupt a matter of 13 years before.
[00:16:01] And Disney certainly seems pretty happy with its decision to buy Marvel. It paid $4 billion but by the end of 2022 it had already made a reported $22.5 billion.
[00:16:15] Sure, Disney has been accused of milking the Marvel franchise for everything it is worth, putting out the same old tired and formulaic plotlines year after year, but the reality is that people can still be relied on to queue up at the cinema and buy tickets.
[00:16:35] And, whether you are a fan or not, you have to admit that Marvel is very efficient at making movies that lots of people like. It has a huge fanbase, which it is very good at engaging with, it makes a particular type of film that is reassuringly familiar to its fans, it knows what works and what doesn’t.
[00:16:57] But, how long can this continue, that is what critics are asking, and what people within Marvel and Disney have admitted to asking themselves.
[00:17:07] In July of 2023, the boss of Disney, Bob Iger, admitted that he wants to make fewer Marvel movies, saying that there were too many, the audience was getting tired of them, and the strategy he wants to follow is to have fewer, better movies, rather than releasing three every year, which Marvel has been doing since 2017.
[00:17:31] Now, like them or loathe them, the Marvel movies have had a huge impact on the world of cinema over the past 15 years or so.
[00:17:40] It has dominated the box office, sold tens of billions of dollars worth of tickets, and introduced a new generation of children to a bunch of superheroes that might never have left the pages of a comic book.
[00:17:53] It might not be Balzac, but Marvel has provided entertainment and amusement to hundreds of millions of people, and, if Disney has got anything to do with it, will continue to provide entertainment for many years to come.
[00:18:10] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marvel Universe.
[00:18:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:19] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:18:23] Are you a Marvel fan? If so, what is the thing you love most about the movies?
[00:18:29] Or are you certainly not a fan like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese? And if so, why not?
[00:18:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marvel.
[00:00:25] It is one of the most successful entertainment brands in the world, and is behind SpiderMan, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and more.
[00:00:35] But, the journey to get there, like a Marvel movie, was all but simple, and in this episode we are going to tell this story.
[00:00:44] It involves Hitler, patriotism, the creative process, a slightly tenuous reference to a 19th century Frenchman, near bankruptcy and more, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:57] I should also say that this episode is a member request, so Rita, if you are listening, thank you very much for this excellent suggestion.
[00:01:06] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The Marvel Universe.
[00:01:12] In 1832, an overweight French 33-year-old had an idea.
[00:01:19] He had been writing books for the best part of a decade, but they had not received the critical success he had hoped for. To be precise, one critic had referred to them as “curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad."
[00:01:37] But all was about to change with the idea that the man had been struck by.
[00:01:44] He would create a huge fictional world based in 19th century France. He would write stories about the characters that existed in this world. Each book would focus on the trials and tribulations of a different character, but there would be some overlap - the main character in one book might be a minor character in another, and so on.
[00:02:07] He ran to his sister’s apartment, declaring “I’m about to become a genius”, and he got to work.
[00:02:15] In the next 18 years he would go on to write almost 100 books about this fictional world, before dropping over and dying from a heart attack aged 51.
[00:02:27] The man was Honoré de Balzac, and his fictional world was La Comédie Humaine, the Human Comedy.
[00:02:36] Fast forward a few hundred years and anyone going to any cinema, almost anywhere in the world, cannot but be bombarded with adverts to dive into another magical fictional world, The Marvel Universe, a world in which characters overlap, fight, work together, interact with each other and influence each other’s stories.
[00:03:02] This, however, is about where the parallels stop.
[00:03:07] Honoré de Balzac died poor and in debt; The Marvel Universe has raked in $30 billion from its movies alone.
[00:03:17] Balzac painted a powerful picture of a wide range of contemporary French society; the Marvel Universe deals with a fantasy world of superhumans and supervillains.
[00:03:30] Balzac’s works are critically acclaimed, with novelists such as Emile Zola and Charles Dickens crediting Balzac as being an influence on their work; Marvel, on the other hand, was called monotonous by Christian Bale, “not cinema” by Martin Scorsese, and “boring as shit” by Ridley Scott.
[00:03:54] Some directors might not like them, but it is undeniable that Marvel films are incredibly popular and successful, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise grossing more than twice the Star Wars franchise at the box office.
[00:04:10] So, how did it all get started?
[00:04:13] Well, we have to go back to the period just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
[00:04:20] Superman was created in 1938, and followed shortly after by Batman, both in comic book form.
[00:04:29] Both of these were a raging success, and a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman had seen this and decided, hey, I think I’d like a slice of that action.
[00:04:42] He started a company called Timely Publications, and in August of 1939 the company published its first comic book, called Marvel Comics, which starred a character called “The Human Torch”.
[00:04:58] Like Superman and Batman before it, it was an almost-immediate success, selling 80,000 copies in its first edition. It was a strong enough sign to Goodman, and he decided to go all-in, hiring full-time illustrators and artists to come up with stories and write the comic books.
[00:05:20] The Human Torch, their first character, was popular but this would be dwarfed by their 1940 creation, Captain America.
[00:05:30] Up until then, the characters in Marvel comics had fought imaginary fictional supervillains, but the villain that Captain America was to be first pitted against was no fictional supervillain; he was none other than the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
[00:05:49] Indeed, if you look at the first Captain America comic, the front has Captain America, clad in the stars and stripes of the United States of America, punching Hitler hard in the face.
[00:06:03] Now, this choice of villain was a clever one for several reasons.
[00:06:09] Firstly, the creators of Captain America were staunch interventionists, they wanted America to get involved in the fight against Hitler, so this was their way of putting forward their political views to their audience.
[00:06:24] And secondly, it did wonders for magazine sales, as this Captain America character tapped into existing patriotic feelings.
[00:06:34] Long story short, it was a runaway success, and Captain America is to this day a character used in many Marvel movies.
[00:06:45] The circulation of Marvel comic books continued to grow in the 1940s and 1950s, but initially, the characters in the comics were relatively one dimensional, or two dimensional if we’re being generous. Plots were simple: hero beats villain.
[00:07:05] As an American audience grew to tire of this kind of formula, Martin Goodman realised that something needed to change. He gave one of his writers, Stan Lee, a brief to create a new group of superheroes.
[00:07:20] Stan Lee was planning on quitting the comic book world anyway, so he figured, why not, I’ll give it a shot. And it would be this decision, and Stan Lee’s execution of it, that would be an instrumental step in setting the course for the success that Marvel is today.
[00:07:41] Stan Lee’s genius was two-fold.
[00:07:45] Firstly, he created characters that were superhuman, they had powers that humans do not have, but they were also very human in terms of their flaws and personal problems. They argued with each other, they were jealous of each other, they were human in their feelings, they had depth.
[00:08:06] The Fantastic Four were the first of these, but they would be followed by Spider Man and Hulk, all deeply flawed characters with human as well as superhuman characteristics.
[00:08:20] Not only did this make for better and more engaging stories, it also meant that the comic books could be enjoyed and bought by adults as well as children.
[00:08:31] And secondly, Stan Lee created an entirely new method of writing comic books, and I think this is particularly interesting.
[00:08:42] Previously, the scriptwriter would create the entire dialogue, saying what happened and who said it, then they would pass the script to the illustrator, who would draw it.
[00:08:56] Stan Lee decided to do things differently.
[00:09:00] Instead, he would think of an outline, a rough idea for the story, then he would give this to the artist and the artist would draw out the scene. Lee would then take the finished drawings and add the narrative afterwards.
[00:09:19] This way it not only allowed the artists to be properly involved in the creative process, but it was also a lot quicker to create a comic book.
[00:09:30] This all ushered in a new era for Marvel, the so-called “Silver Age” that went on throughout the 1960s and saw the creation of many of Marvel’s most popular characters.
[00:09:43] Now, we need to jump forward a bit to the 1990s, as it’s here that we find things not going so well for Marvel.
[00:09:53] Marvel had, until then, made money primarily from comic book sales and merchandise.
[00:10:00] Sure, people bought comic books to read, enjoy and throw away, or leave in a pile in a corner of the room. But there was another category of comic book buyer, someone who bought not one, not two, but perhaps 10 or 20 editions of a comic book, and kept them in pristine condition with the expressed intention of selling them later for a profit.
[00:10:27] See, comic book companies like Marvel had done a very good job at encouraging Americans that comic books could be great investments, because early editions could be sold later on for a profit. Indeed, there had been some cases where early editions of now popular Marvel comics had been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:10:50] But people soon enough got wise to the fact that if 100,000 people or 200,000 people all held the same supposedly “valuable first edition” of a comic book, well it really wasn’t that valuable.
[00:11:06] And in the mid 1990s, this comic book bubble had started to burst. Sales were dropping, and Marvel executives hypothesised that it was because their sales had been artificially inflated by people buying 20 copies of a comic book as an investment; now that same person bought one copy, or perhaps none at all.
[00:11:31] Combined with this, Marvel had made some poor investment decisions and as a result it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1996.
[00:11:42] It was, kind of like a Marvel story, the low point, where it seems like there is no hope.
[00:11:49] The money had all gone, financial speculators were ready to pounce, and there seemed like there was no escape; the company was going to die.
[00:12:00] But, like a Marvel story again, Marvel managed to rise from the ashes.
[00:12:07] The rise was, if we can continue the phoenix rising from the ashes analogy, slow.
[00:12:14] The rise started with the complicated but important issue of intellectual property. Marvel had created, as you’ve heard, some incredibly popular comic book characters: Spider Man, Captain America, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and so on.
[00:12:32] Given the collapse in the comic book industry in the mid 1990s, Marvel knew that it had to diversify, and one clear option here was movies.
[00:12:43] But Marvel was a comic book company, not a movie company.
[00:12:49] The new boss of Marvel, an Israeli called Avi Arad, sold the rights to some of its popular characters to movie studios, who would then make the movies.
[00:13:00] And these movies were a big success. Blade, in 1998, X-Men in 2000, and the Spider-Man movies from 2002 to 2007.
[00:13:12] They were a big success at the box office, but Marvel reportedly saw very little money from them.
[00:13:21] According to one report, Blade made $70 million dollars at the box office, but Marvel only saw $25,000 of that.
[00:13:32] Marvel was, essentially, renting the use of its characters to movie studios, who would then make vast amounts of money by using them in their movies.
[00:13:42] And things might have continued this way had it not been for a 41-year-old talent agent called David Maisel.
[00:13:51] In 2003, he pitched the boss of Marvel Studios, Avi Arad, on an idea.
[00:13:58] Like Balzac back in 1830, Maisel had this idea of a huge interconnected universe of Marvel characters. Instead of Marvel creating the characters and then licensing them to a movie studio, Marvel would be the movie studio.
[00:14:17] Arad had been looking for a solution anyway, and he was sold. He made Maisel the boss of a new unit of Marvel, called Marvel Studios, and told him to get to work.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, actually making a Marvel movie takes quite some time; it took a couple of years for Maisel to raise the $525 million from a bank to invest in the movies, and then he actually needed to make the movie itself.
[00:14:48] First, they needed to choose which movie to make, or rather, which character to make a movie out of. There were a lot to choose from, and according to one report the way they chose was by doing a load of focus groups with children and asking them which Marvel character they wanted to play with. The answer came back: Ironman.
[00:15:11] The children had spoken and the first movie to be made was indeed Ironman which came out in 2008. It was, as you may remember, an immediate hit, making $100 million dollars in its opening weekend and just shy of $600 million dollars at the box office.
[00:15:32] Marvel knew that it was on to something. It had this deep roster of characters that it could draw from, it could make movies about any of them, and could make hundreds of millions of dollars each time.
[00:15:45] And so it was that just after a year after releasing Ironman, the company was bought by Disney for $4 billion dollars. It's quite the turnaround for a company that had declared itself bankrupt a matter of 13 years before.
[00:16:01] And Disney certainly seems pretty happy with its decision to buy Marvel. It paid $4 billion but by the end of 2022 it had already made a reported $22.5 billion.
[00:16:15] Sure, Disney has been accused of milking the Marvel franchise for everything it is worth, putting out the same old tired and formulaic plotlines year after year, but the reality is that people can still be relied on to queue up at the cinema and buy tickets.
[00:16:35] And, whether you are a fan or not, you have to admit that Marvel is very efficient at making movies that lots of people like. It has a huge fanbase, which it is very good at engaging with, it makes a particular type of film that is reassuringly familiar to its fans, it knows what works and what doesn’t.
[00:16:57] But, how long can this continue, that is what critics are asking, and what people within Marvel and Disney have admitted to asking themselves.
[00:17:07] In July of 2023, the boss of Disney, Bob Iger, admitted that he wants to make fewer Marvel movies, saying that there were too many, the audience was getting tired of them, and the strategy he wants to follow is to have fewer, better movies, rather than releasing three every year, which Marvel has been doing since 2017.
[00:17:31] Now, like them or loathe them, the Marvel movies have had a huge impact on the world of cinema over the past 15 years or so.
[00:17:40] It has dominated the box office, sold tens of billions of dollars worth of tickets, and introduced a new generation of children to a bunch of superheroes that might never have left the pages of a comic book.
[00:17:53] It might not be Balzac, but Marvel has provided entertainment and amusement to hundreds of millions of people, and, if Disney has got anything to do with it, will continue to provide entertainment for many years to come.
[00:18:10] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marvel Universe.
[00:18:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:19] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:18:23] Are you a Marvel fan? If so, what is the thing you love most about the movies?
[00:18:29] Or are you certainly not a fan like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese? And if so, why not?
[00:18:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
