Do Marvel Executives Read All The Comics About A Character? The Answer Is Not What You Think

Do MCU executives read all the comics about a Marvel character? A new interview finally sheds light on the topic

By Ishita Chatterjee
November 28,2022
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a sprawling franchise filled with new and old characters. Over the years, fans have appreciated the nods to the source material. But it has made us wonder whether the writers of these movies read the entire comics quota of the character. Now in a recent interview, an MCU Executive has finally revealed the truth.

MCU Executive Reveals If Writers Read All The Comics Of A Character

Nate Moore
Nate Moore

In a recent interview, MCU producer Nate Moore (the man behind Black Panther and Captain America), said that he doesn’t prefer writers who are fans of Marvel comics. In fact, he considers love for the comics to be a “red flag”. This is because he thinks that being a fan could hinder a writer’s ability to objectively look at the work.

After this, our immediate question was- what is the reading requirement for the writers who get hired for a MCU project? In an interview with Matthew Belloni of The Town podcast, he revealed just that. He said:

“So once we decide on making a given character, it’s up to the executive on that property to become an expert on that character. And that’s anything from, for instance when I was put on Captain America 2, literally reading every appearance of Captain America in publishing. It takes about, I would say about 3 to 4 months.”

Moore further said:

“If you think about Marvel, we have 50+ years of material to pull from, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of ideas. If anything, there’s sort of an overwhelming amount of ideas and it has to be someone being passionate about any given idea to figure out how to get it on its feet.”

So MCU executives and writers do have to read up on virtually every available comicbook regarding a character. This is quite unexpected because for long it was thought in MCU fan circles that the bosses just read major Marvel events and made movies/ shows out of that. Now fans will be glad to know that proper research is indeed done.

How Do Marvel Executives Whittle Down Decades Of Comic Material Into A Movie?

 Marvel comics
Marvel comics

With decades of comic material ready for use, it surely becomes tough to choose what will get adapted. Regarding this dilemma Nate Moore further said in the podcast that it’s basically a mix-n-match process. He explained:

“In reading everything, you start to build an internal document of the things that are really interesting, characters that are really great, moments that are really great, cool facts that you maybe don’t know off the surface or off a Wikipedia entry. Also things from publishing that feel problematic, things that we could tweak, things that we’ve done before so we have to change. And out of that process, you come away with a document that’s a little bit indicative of what we think the movie could be.”

At the end of this subject he said:

“So we started to do our homework first and then once we felt like, ‘Hey, we have a good handle on what we like about any given property,’ in the meantime, we’ve hopefully been meeting the right writers who can breathe life into that.”

Now you can watch all the MCU movies and know exactly how they came to be.

Stay tuned for more Marvel updates.