Marvel's ex-CEO Peter Cuneo on launching the MCU, selling to Disney, and recent box office flops

The nostalgia site I-Mockery worried Disney would “remove any and all adult appeal these comics and characters have by trying to ‘kiddiefy’ everything.” San Diego Entertainer Magazine declared the day the news hit as “a dark day in comic book history.” And commenters on Comicbookmovie.com reacted by saying things like, “They are going to sanitize your comic book favorites” and “I don't want to see a Donald Duck-Iron Man crossover!!!”

While Marvel keeping its identity was the chief concern among fans, when I ask former Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo — who helped oversee the sale to Disney — what the boardroom thought about that factor, he bluntly responds: “Not much, I have to be honest.” Instead, he says that they really had no choice but to sell.

That’s just one of the several Marvel-related topics I wanted to talk about with Cuneo, who is releasing a new book about leadership, Superhero Leadership: 28 Ways to Lead with Courage, Strength, and Compassion on Feb. 3.

Turning Marvel around

For starters, I wanted to know if Cuneo had any pre-existing affection for Marvel before coming onboard. “No,” Cuneo freely admits. When he became Marvel’s CEO in 1999, the only characters he knew were Spider-Man and the Hulk. Yet with the company still recovering from a recent bankruptcy, he saw the job as a challenge he could sink his claws into like Wolverine into a Sentinel.

“What attracted me to Marvel is, I'm addicted to these turnarounds,” says Cuneo. “I also think, in many cases, having no background in an industry, allows you to go in and see the craziness that exists. Most of these companies are in trouble for a host of reasons.”

In this case, Marvel was hit especially hard when the comic book speculator market collapsed in 1993, which ultimately saw nine out of every ten comic book shops close. The early 1990s enjoyed great comic book sales and it was the first time comics began to be recognized as a valuable art form. However, publishers took advantage of this by launching new comics with limited-edition covers and other gimmicks. Sales were strong for a while, but eventually collapsed, nearly killing the entire industry.

Coming into Marvel, Cuneo he knew his job wasn’t about interfering with the comics.

“I read scripts, but I never made a change,” he says. “I read the comic books, but I read them after they were published.” The only kind of creative decisions Cuneo weighed in on involved killing off major characters, which had a direct impact on the business. He also made the call to ditch the antiquated Comics Code in 2001.

Cuneo’s work was more about the business side, including getting back the high-level talent Marvel had lost in recent years. To help with that, he hired a new editor-in-chief in Joe Quesada, who’d been a comics artist since 1990. Quesada not only helped lure people back, but he and Cuneo oversaw Marvel’s rise from the second-largest comics publisher (after DC) to the first. A large part of that success could be attributed to the launch of Marvel’s “Ultimate” imprint, which rebooted the stories of its biggest heroes. With Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Spider-Man and Mark Millar on both Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates (an Avengers rebrand), Marvel eliminated the barrier to entry for many new readers who’d been otherwise scared off by decades of continuity to catch up on in the ongoing books.

Meanwhile, Marvel’s characters started to explode in popularity in the early 2000s thanks to the release of 20th Century Fox’s first X-Men movie in 2000 and Sony’s Spider-Man in 2002. Before Cuneo arrived, those properties had been licensed in a last-ditch attempt to keep the business afloat, but it was during his time as CEO that Marvel reaped the benefits of those deals.

“We got a share of the revenues from the movies, whether it was the box office, or airline showings, or DVDs, which were a big part of the industry back then,” Cuneo says. “This is when we had no money, coming out of bankruptcy.”

“We could do it better than the big studios”

Despite the success of those franchises (or perhaps because of it), leadership at Marvel — especially, according to Cuneo, Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad — got it into their heads that they could make movies too. “In 2006, we decided we had been basically apprenticing for the big studios,” Cuneo says. “We had people on set every day. We had creative control over the scripts. We certainly had a role in casting. We'd learned a lot from the very late 1990s to 2006, and we could do it better than the big studios and less expensive.” This was because Marvel didn’t have the kind of overhead a major studio does with empty sound stages and gigantic corporate offices.

The company also approached casting much differently than the conventional wisdom dictated. “Hollywood wanted us to cast a lot of big names in various roles for the major characters,” Cuneo says. “We felt, 'The heck with that!' We just want good actors and actresses. The hero is the character, not who's playing the character.”

Despite this, he admits having some concerns about their first major casting choice, saying “Robert Downey Jr. had had some personal problems. His mugshot was all over the media. But to their credit, the people running Marvel Studios said, 'We think that he will be great.' The board, of which I was one, was very skeptical, to be honest. But he did a screen test and it was frankly phenomenal. So he was cast, and the rest is history.”

The Disney sale

After Iron Man’s stellar box office success, Marvel was humming along as well as one of Tony Stark’s Arc Reactors. The bankruptcy was a whole decade in the past, the financials were finally in order, and the company had a nearly infinite supply of characters it could bring to the big screen all on their own. So why did Marvel end up selling to Disney? “We were not looking to sell,” Cuneo says. “Honestly, we didn't have a choice. In the world of public companies, when you get an unsolicited offer that's a 50 percent increase over the price in the stock market, you owe it to the shareholders to sell. If we didn't sell, we would've been sued for not selling.”

While some Marvel fans were worried by the sale, Cuneo believed Disney, in particular, was exactly the right company to buy Marvel. “The one company that would understand Marvel was Disney,” he says. “Disney had its own Marvel characters, in a way. They were aimed at young people, but they were doing that long before Marvel. They were the only people monetizing these characters in many different media forms and consumer products.”

Marvel’s post-Endgame problems

Since 2019’s release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has been visibly struggling to deliver the same quality of film and box office returns it had in the years leading up to that point. Cuneo has a few theories about what’s gone wrong.

“I really hate to be critical, not being in the organization, but I'll throw some things out for you to think about,” he says. “The first is that our emphasis, when we were making the movies, was on character development because we believed that understanding the origin story of the characters — and understanding their strengths and their weaknesses — was one of the reasons that Marvel's characters did so well. They were all flawed. That's what gets fans emotionally connected to the characters.”

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand, Cuneo believes that sort of storytelling has fallen by the wayside.

“We had far less bang-'em-up, shoot-'em-up,” he concludes. “We would have a big action scene to start. We would have a more modest scene in the middle and then a big finish. But most of the film was character development. Today, the films are all action scenes. There are characters showing up that fans never even heard of. So I think origin stories and character development are very important, and I don't see that as much.”

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