Marvel Studios

Simply Marvelous

We're not going to cover the big studios releasing this movie, because ye gods that part of its studio history is a mess.

Paramount owned the rights when the process started, but Walt Disney bought up Marvel Comics in 2011, and with them came the rights to all of the Marvel characters, including some who were over at Universal and…it was a mess.

Instead, we'll focus on the actual production company that made the film.

Marvel Studios, as they're currently known, are a branch of Marvel Comics started to make movies based on their characters. Unlike their rivals DC Comics—who were owned lock, stock and barrel by Warner Bros and never had these issues—they got started by selling the rights to individual characters to other production companies to make movies out of them.

If you'll notice, all of the X-Men movies are released by 20th Century Fox—the X-Men aren't part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of this writing—while the first five Spider-Man movies were released by Sony/Columbia. That's because they own the rights, and in most cases acquired them back when comic book movies were anything but a sure bet.

Underdog to Top Dog

However, Marvel still had number of their own characters under their own roof, simply because nobody thought they had much potential at the box office. They included the likes of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and Nick Fury. Sound familiar? Some of those guys had been farmed out like Spidey and the X-Men, but Hollywood didn't move on them, and without a movie in the can, whichever studio owned the character had to give him or her back and play nice.

(As a matter of perspective, the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies were produced partially to make sure the character stayed with Sony Pictures. If you've seen Civil War, you know how well that worked out.)

With these characters coming back into their possession, and the big studios clearly not interested in making movies with them, Marvel decided to try their hand at it themselves. The first film out of the gate was 2008's Iron Man, which made all kinds of money and clearly showed that there was a market for these kinds of figures: heroes that mainstream America didn't know too well, but was definitely ready to learn about.

At the end of the first Iron Man movie, the filmmakers included a post-credits scene where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) runs into Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in his living room and gets a little sales pitch about something called "The Avengers Initiative." Initially, they just thought it would be a cool way to give the hardcore fans something neat to geek out about on the ride home afterwards. But with Iron Man raking in tons of cash, that throwaway started to look more and more like a promise.

And Marvel didn't intend to let the opportunity pass. A second Iron Man movie followed two years later, along with a Thor movie and a Captain America movie…all leading up to this one.

The Avengers hit like nobody's business in May of 2012, raking in $1.5 billion worldwide and giving Marvel Studios the room to play with whatever they wanted. We're pretty sure you're familiar with the results. The first collection of films—Iron Man 1 and 2, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First Avenger—was categorized as "Phase 1." Phase 2 consisted of the next round of Marvel movies: Iron Man 3, Thor: the Dark World, Captain America: the Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and the second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron.

Phase 3 gets even more ambitious, with ten movies planned between 2016 and 2019. (That comes on top of another 10 TV shows that have either aired or are in the planning stages.)

It's safe to say that Tinseltown has a new 600-pound gorilla on the block. And it wouldn't have been possible without The Avengers.