Thanks to MARVEL's Agent M and Strommy, we have the following highlights from Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada's panel at this weekend's D23 event in Anaheim. To read the entire coverage, where the former E-i-C talks in detail about the history of Marvel and the duo cover the Ultimate Spider-Man animated series footage shown, click on the link below to head on over to the site. For now, here are some of the main highlights.
Q is discussing the licensed Marvel movies - X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil. Not made by Marvel Studios, but really got our characters out there.
Now talking about Blade. Big applause from the fans here for Blade movies.
Moving onto Marvel Studios now--around 2000, there were a lot of Marvel movies coming out. The first one was really Blade, though, which was a big deal because New Line saw the potential in a character that is really a third-tier character in publishing.
We started licensing out characters such as X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four. We created Marvel Studios in order to create our own movies, beginning with Iron Man in 2008.
Big applause for the Marvel Studios movies and HUGE applause for Iron Man movie.
We introduced interconnectivity to the movie, which hadn't been done before.
Joe Q just said that originally the baseball game that Cap hears at the end of the movie was a Yankee game. But Joe told studios people that didn't make sense since Cap was from Brooklyn. He'd be a Dodgers fan. It's the little details!
Ultimate Spider-Man, coming next year, is the first Marvel cartoon produced almost solely by Marvel creators--Jeph Loeb, Joe Quesada, the Man of Action team, Brian Bendis...
Moving onto Marvel Television right now, which only started to build up a couple years before the Disney purchase.
Joe Q is talking about when Disney bought Marvel. We still work as an autonomous unit--Disney wanted us to just continue doing what we do, just as part of the Disney family.
Bringing things back to what makes a Marvel character a Marvel character. Two weeks in as Editor in Chief, Joe asked Stan Lee the formula for creating a perfect Marvel character. He said that if you show Spider-Man about to jump off the precipice of a building, the reality is he's just a red and blue suit. But if you start telling us about his lovelife, his problems, the people who don't like him, his family, then we are him when he jumps to swing through the skyline.
First question is about whether there will be any more stage productions like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Joe Q says not right now, but you never know what will happen.
Question about how Marvel tries to bring in new readers while still paying homage to everything that's come before. We don't do hard reboots at Marvel--all the characters still have their same history going back to the 60s. We did do the Ultimate Universe, though, which imagined what would happen if Stan Lee had created the characters today.
Question about what future, if any, there is for Marvel in the Disney parks. "There have been some talks," says Joe.
Is there a chance of seeing Spider-Man or X-Men connecting to the Marvel Studios films? It's difficult right now with the deals with Sony and Fox being what they are
What's going on with the Marvel rides at Universal Florida? They're staying there.
Are there any plans for a Deadpool movie? That belongs with our partners at Fox, so we don't have any control over that.
And that's a wrap! The Marvel panel at D23 is done!