“Twenty years ago, few would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole,” MJSchulman writes.
Consider another origin story, hitherto ignored. One late-summer weekend in 2003, a talent-agency executive named David Maisel was in his sweatpants, in the loft of his L.A. apartment. He had spent two years at the Endeavor agency, and he was contemplating his next move. But he didn’t want to remain an agent—he wanted to run a studio.
Maisel grew up in Saratoga Springs, the son of a dentist and a Czechoslovakian-born housewife. “Marvel comics, and especially Iron Man, were my favorite things,” he recalled, sitting on a sofa with Iron Man throw pillows, his feet on a Spider-Man rug. Tony Stark had a cool suit and a captain-of-industry swagger, but “he had a frail heart.
At the Marvel Studios offices, now above a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills, a team of mostly Gen X men who had grown up on Marvel comics—including Feige and Avi Arad’s son, Ari—planned the first slate of movies, which would introduce the heroes one by one, and then unite them in “The Avengers.” “There was this general feeling of, like, Holy shit, they’re letting us do it,” the screenwriter Zak Penn recalled.
To direct “Iron Man,” Marvel hired Jon Favreau, who was best known for the single-dude comedy “Swingers” and the Christmas hit “Elf.” The title role came down to Timothy Olyphant and Downey, who was in a career slump after years of drug arrests and rehab. “My board thought I was crazy to put the future of the company in the hands of an addict,” Maisel said. “I helped them understand how great he was for the role. We all had confidence that he was clean and would stay clean.
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