Kevin Feige has always been the guiding creative vision behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his achievements with the franchise have been widely praised. But Feige wasn’t always in charge. He had a more junior position when the MCU began with Iron Man back in 2008. Although Feige ran Marvel Studios and produced all of its movies, he still had to answer to the now-infamous Ike Perlmutter.
Perlmutter remained a middleman between Feige and Disney boss Alan Horn until 2015 when Feige reached the final straw working with Perlmutter and went over his head and had him removed from the equation. Since then, the MCU has gone from one of the most popular franchises in the world to a cultural landmark. After getting rid of Perlmutter, Feige was able to introduce Captain Marvel and Black Panther, whose solo movies had previously been vetoed by Perlmutter.
One of Perlmutter’s final offenses was meddling in Avengers: Age of Ultron. After enjoying some creative freedom on the first Avengers movie, Joss Whedon was given copious notes by Perlmutter. He’s the reason the final movie is more of a bridge between other MCU movies to set up Phase Three than its own thing.
Another egregious change made by Perlmutter came a couple of years earlier when Shane Black was making Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 has more of its own story and identity than its 2010 predecessor, but it’s far from a satisfying conclusion to Tony Stark’s solo trilogy. While Tony’s characterization is spot-on and forcing him to fight bad guys without his tech was an interesting twist, Iron Man 3 ultimately suffered from a muddled script. And this muddled script is the result of Perlmutter’s notorious interference.
Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon franchise, is regarded as one of the best screenwriters working in Hollywood – especially in action cinema – so when Marvel hired him to write a movie, they should’ve just left him to do his job. And under Feige, that’s probably what would happen. Since taking the reins, Feige has given more or less carte blanche to directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler to make their movies as personal and unique as they want. Under Perlmutter, filmmakers had a lot less freedom.
Black’s original script for Iron Man 3 revealed Rebecca Hall’s character Maya Hansen to be the true villain. In the first and second acts of the finished movie, it’s easy to see that the story originally went that way. But Perlmutter refused to allow the Iron Man threequel to feature a female villain, because he didn’t believe kids would buy a female action figure.
So, Black had to rewrite the script to shift the villain role onto Aldrich Killian’s shoulders. Killian became the third Iron Man movie villain in a row to be a wannabe Stark competitor seeking revenge against Tony. It’s obvious that Killian was never meant to be the primary villain, because he’s characterized as weak and cowardly in the opening scenes. Maya losing out on being the villain made her pretty much redundant in the final piece. Her arc in the second half of the movie is completely inconsistent with the first half. In the first half, she’s set up to be harboring a dark secret, and in the second half, she’s just surprised by somebody else’s dark secret.
The twist that revealed the Mandarin to be a political puppet played by a soccer hooligan named Trevor Slattery proved to be very controversial, because casual viewers who’d become invested in the Mandarin as a terrifying villain throughout the movie felt cheated, and comic book readers who knew the Mandarin as Tony Stark’s arch-nemesis felt even more cheated. But this twist might have worked if it paved the way for an equally interesting villain. Killian is so meek and unthreatening that he barely registers as a villain. When the Mandarin is taken out of the picture, Iron Man 3 is left without any real force of antagonism. If Maya was revealed to be the evil mastermind and the script was more coherent, that might not have been the case.
Guy Pearce is a terrific actor, but like Kylo Ren, Killian was just never all that intimidating as a villain. He never felt like much of a threat to Tony, physically or intellectually or ideologically – he was just a thorn in Tony’s side until his unceremonious demise. Rebecca Hall has the chops to play an unforgettable supervillain and Maya’s grand plan (whatever it would’ve been) could’ve tied the whole story together a lot better than the final movie. Shane Black is a master storyteller; the version of Iron Man 3 altered by executives may not be a cohesive story, but Black’s original script surely was.
Marvel ruined a $200 million movie so they wouldn’t have to produce a female action figure based on a sexist fallacy, and then they never even released a Killian action figure, so it was all for nothing. It may be too late to save Iron Man 3 or Age of Ultron or give movies to non-white males sooner, but at least Perlmutter’s out and Feige’s leading the charge now with more focus on creativity, inclusivity, and collaboration. In Feige we trust.