The Marvel Creative Committee has a deservedly rough reputation within the MCU fandom. As far back as 2015, the team of executives was drawing ire for its conservative outlook on the MCU, creating friction with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the rest of the creative team.
With the recent release of The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a massive tome chronicling the creation of the MCU, we now have even more insight into Feige's clashes with the committee. We already knew that they clashed with director Edgar Wright among other, but the ending of Captain America: Civil War was reportedly where matters truly came to a head.
As spotted by Slash Film, he book describes heated disagreements between directors Anthony and Joe Russo and the Marvel Creative Committee over whether Iron Man and Captain America should actually battle in the film's climax. According to writer Stephen McFeely, the committee wanted the Avengers to put aside their differences and battle five super soldiers in a submarine base.
"Civil War started a civil war in Marvel," co-director Joe Russo said. "But when we drew the line in the sand, it became a moment where that company was either going to slowly bend back toward where it had come from, or it was gonna slowly start to bend toward new territory."
It was enough that Feige, who nominally served as a mediator between the two groups, was compelled to side with the filmmakers. The dispute was taken to Disney executive Alan Horn, who wound up backing Marvel Studios. A subsequent restructuring would see Feige reporting directly to Horn.
The decision ended years of disagreements with the Marvel Creative Committee, which consisted of toy executive Alan Fine, Marvel Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, Marvel publisher Dan Buckley, and former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. They were backed by billionaire Isaac Permutter, who clashed with Feige over issues of diversity, and was reportedly behind the decision to market Avengers merchandise exclusively to boys.
"Kevin is one of the most talented film executives in the business, but my sense was that the strained relationship with New York was threatening his continued success,” former Disney CEO Bob Iger wrote in his book, The Ride of a Lifetime. "I knew I had to intervene, and so in May 2015, I made the decision to split Marvel’s movie-making unit off from the rest of Marvel and bring it under Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Studios. Kevin would now report directly to Alan, and would benefit from his experience, and the tensions that had built up between him and the New York office would be alleviated."
Of course, we all know what happened after that: Iron Man did in fact fight Captain America; the Marvel Creative Committee was disbanded in 2015, and the MCU is more popular than ever. Russo's main takeaway was that the MCU had to be "disruptive" if it wanted to continue thriving.
"The big thing I used to say all the time was, 'People tell you how much they love chocolate ice cream. You give it to them six days a week, they're gonna throw it in your face on day six. And the problem is, if you have three chocolate ice creams in the can at 200 million dollars a pop, you're screwed. So you better start figuring out ahead of time how to be disruptive," he said.
We'll see if the MCU can keep up its creative momentum with Marvel's Eternals, which goes into wide release in the United States on November 5.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN