Sean Callagy

they could have spent 100,000 and blocked us from having Iron Man, right?

They could have, you know, sometimes you wanna play offense, sometimes you wanna play defense.

And if they had put on their defense hat for a while, they might think, oh, I don't really wanna make an Iron Man movie, but we'll delay David from having it for five years or 10 years, you know?

And that probably would have been a smart chess move for them.

But luckily, they didn't and got it back.

And then the idea of a comic book company making a $100 million plus movie was heresy at the time.

No one did that.

And frankly, they don't still.

Barbie is owned by Mattel, but they licensed it to Warner Brothers.

so they didn't get much profit from the movie they got you know they they got toy sales maybe a higher degree of barbie sales that year or afterwards um in the same way we get higher spider-man toy sales after a sony movie but um the the zero-based thinking which took a lot of work and studying you know up into when i was 32 at this time

So it was school and graduate school and almost eight, nine years of working in consulting and then in Hollywood at the studio, Disney and the talent agencies soaking up information to get the inspiration finally to, which was over a weekend,

that, wait, wow, if Marvel controlled its characters, it's a natural universe, you get to know the characters, you wanna see them in every movie, you wanna stay involved with the plot.

So if one movie works, like Iron Man, instead of just two sequels, like most films,

There's 100 sequels or quasi sequels.

And that asymmetrical risk reward was incredibly attractive as a business and incredibly the idea of connecting the characters as a fan was incredibly attractive as a creative thing to do.

And that all went into convincing a man named Mike Perlmutter to at least give me a shot

at coming into Marvel, which was the hardest yes I've ever gotten.

In fact, I didn't get the yes.

In fact, my meeting- Can you contextualize who is Ike?

Ike Perlmutter at the time was already a billionaire.