While you might not expect Disney laying off literally thousands of employees to be a good look, the Marvel fandom is nonetheless celebrating over the news of one particular exit from the House of Mouse as part of a widespread cost-cutting campaign. Long-term Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter has parted ways with the company, bringing much joy to the MCU masses.
But why is Perlmutter’s pink-slipping earning so much applause? Aside from his close political and personal affiliations with Donald Trump, the notoriously irascible exec is known to have been a thorn in the sides of both Disney CEO Bob Iger and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige for as long as the MCU has existed, with clashes once getting so heated that Perlmutter almost cost the cinema-changing franchise its true leading man, Feige himself.
Following Perlmutter’s firing, a once-alarming exposé from The Hollywood Reporter dating back to 2015 is resurfacing, reminding us all just how close Marvel came to losing its chief architect and champion. THR‘s piece outlines that, in the greatest of ironies, it was during production on Captain America: Civil War that the internal fighting reached a peak, in part due to Perlmutter’s penny-pinching nature infuriating Feige, who was determined to make Civil War an Avengers-level event.
Relations broke down to such an extent that Perlmutter was primed to fire Feige, but thankfully, Iger came up with the notion to separate Marvel Studios from Marvel Entertainment, meaning Perlmutter was no longer Feige’s boss. It’s no coincidence that the franchise’s first female- and Black-led projects occurred after 2015, either, as Iger has been open about Perlmutter’s repeated vetoing of any such concepts prior to the corporate restructure, which undoubtedly was to the MCU’s benefit.
With Perlmutter’s influence over Marvel being well and truly over, then, a long-festering wound in the company — one that nearly created a Feige-less MCU, something practically impossible to imagine — has finally been healed.
