Marvel Studios: Assembling a Universe Page #5

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As Marvel Studios

was unleashing epic adventures

onto movie screens around the globe,

smaller stories were being developed

to expand the universe,

giving fans a shot to further connect

with some of their favorite characters.

The great thing about

the Marvel characters

is they continue to grow

and evolve and expand.

There's a lot of other

stories you want to tell.

There are some characters

we want to highlight,

namely Clark Gregg, Agent Coulson.

And we decided to do a

couple of short films.

It seemed like a logical

step when we were building the

universe to be able to go into

different nooks and crannies

and tell stories that maybe

didn't warrant a giant feature-film

treatment but still would be

stand-alone interesting stories.

And when you look at the

history of the comics,

there's great one-off books,

and they're called one-shots.

So we took that name

for the shorts program

and told these stand-alone

stories that...

that couldn't exist anywhere

else but the Marvel universe.

During the same call when I was

told about my impending demise,

I was also told about these shorts.

And I got the feeling

that they did want to do

whatever they could

to kind of let us know

a little bit more about Coulson,

what his daily life is like,

you know, just to build the

audience's relationship to him

in advance of what's gonna go down.

So we came up with the

first few shorts, "the Consultant"

and "A funny thing happened

on the way to Thor's hammer."

The "funny thing happened

on the way to Thor's hammer"

was the drive from when we

last saw Coulson in "Iron Man 2"

straight out to New Mexico

to check out Thor's hammer.

We found it.

What I loved about

Coulson was at first,

he seems kind of just like

an annoying bureaucrat.

- Who owns that car outside?!

- I do.

But it's really more like a lease.

As the story goes along,

to my great thrill,

he turns out to be a much

more formidable character.

Sorry for the mess.

Just those action

beats that we had in there

burned through 80% of the

budget for both the shorts,

so they came to me after

I wrote the first one.

They were like, "it's great. We have

the budget for two guys talking now."

So in "the Consultant,"

I thought it would be cool

to see a couple of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents

brainstorming a way to

deal with this red-tape,

bureaucratic politics of what was

going on with the Avengers initiative.

We send a patsy to

sabotage a debriefing.

- A patsy?

- Yes, someone to screw it up,

someone so inept that General Ross

will refuse to release Blonsky.

It reintroduced Sitwell, who

had a small role in "Thor,"

and it was able to tie

up a pretty big thread

at the end of "the Incredible Hulk"

when Tony Stark meets General Ross.

You know, I hate to say

I told you so, general,

but that super soldier program

was put on ice for a reason.

I've always felt that hardware

was much more reliable.

We had just seen "the Avengers,"

so we thought about it for awhile,

and we're like, "man, New York's a mess.

There's probably those guns

littered all over the place."

"What if these young

kids found the Chitauri weapon

the day of the big battle of New York?"

When we first

conceived of the idea for "Item 47,"

Eric was smart enough to bring

in the character of Sitwell

to kind of be the

antagonist in that story.

Please stop squirming.

The Marvel universe is so

big and it's so interconnected

that smaller characters

can become more developed.

It's a short film, so obviously

you're restricted with money, time.

So telling a simple story

is a great opportunity for us

to continue to expand other characters.

So we developed "Agent Carter."

We know we have a resource in

Hayley Atwell that's being underused.

Captain America perishes in the ice.

He's not found.

He's believed dead.

What happens to Agent Carter?

It was fun to be able to play

with the kind of chauvinism

and the sexism of the mid-'40s

office place.

Luckily for her, once, um,

all the men have left for

the night to go drinking and she's

stuck doing extra office work,

there is an alarm bell that goes off,

and suddenly there is

an emergency mission.

This enemy will not

hesitate to use lethal force.

Three to five agents recommended.

We framed her as an amazing superhero

secret agent in her own right.

She's played a bigger

role in the universe

that you've already enjoyed

than you may have realized.

Tell her she'll be running

S.H.I.E.L.D. with me.

Whenever we approach any project,

it's always from the perspective

of "how can we have

the most fun with this?"

Bloody hell. It's not

exactly the Ritz, is it?

"All hail the king" was really conceived

on the set of "Iron Man 3"

by Drew Pearce and Stephen Broussard.

One of the things we wanted to

do was take the source material,

the character, the ideas

behind the character,

and find an entirely fresh take on them.

I was here in America for my big break.

This would be the tv pilot.

"Caged heat."

Wonderful piece.

Handsome lad, handsome lad.

The Marvel

universe was expanding,

and fans could follow across

the movies and the short films.

But now an opportunity to

give fans a weekly visit

into the Marvel world presented itself.

And to launch this new series,

they turned to a trusted, old friend.

I'll be honest with you,

in "the Avengers,"

as they were killing me,

there's a number of takes

of me looking at the camera,

going, "I'm the glue!"

And, you know, I

thought it was all over.

It had been quite a beautiful

ride and really felt like

the way that the fans

responded to Coulson

is kind of what breathed

life back into him.

I'm clearance level 6.

I know that Agent Coulson

was killed in action

before the battle of New York.

Got the full report.

Welcome to level 7.

We see this series as

an opportunity for us

to tell stories that

happen after "the Avengers"

and before "Avengers 2."

I like to think of it as the

boardwalk through the Marvel universe.

We have seen S.H.I.E.L.D.

in all of the Marvel movies,

and it's always big S.H.I.E.L.D.

We're sort of isolating

that into this team of six.

We go into

superheroes, weird science,

things from other planets,

things that can't be explained.

This goo, sir, very similar

to the serum Dr. Erskine

- developed in the '40s for the...

- Super soldiers.

We are a team with some special talents,

but basically we're trying to help out

or investigate cases that

have not been classified yet.

Coulson understands

very well what it's like

to be a normal human

in a supernatural world,

and so he creates a team not unlike

the way Nick Fury did in "the Avengers."

That translates in the role of

people into someone who's not

just a great anchor for us

emotionally but a great leader.

We're exactly the

right team to go around

and investigate new threats,

people attempting to kind of

utilize some of the technologies

and doorways that we

discovered in "the Avengers."

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