Marvel Studios began its life rolling the dice. Iron Man was the first self-produced feature film Marvel Comics adaptation for Marvel Studios, and it wasn’t like Iron Man was some incredibly famous superhero character or wildly popular toy at the time. Most general audiences were unfamiliar with Iron Man and wary of the film—we’d been through a lot of bad superhero movies at that point. But Marvel’s gamble paid off, and then they rolled the dice again with Marvel’s The Avengers, betting that audiences would turn up to a crossover movie starring characters from …