We’ve previously written about the Marvel Studios Parliament, the group of executive producers who marshall the shared universe of the MCU alongside Kevin Feige himself. While talking with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings producer Jonathan Schwartz, we asked him a bit more about how Parliament works. and specifically how each producer joins the film or series they work on from conception, hiring of writers and directors, to production and release.
It’s not really a genre thing or a speciality thing. We all sort of go off together and talk about who wants to do what and what’s coming up, and we all kind of end up working on stuff we’re excited about. I just like martial arts movies and Shang-Chi felt like the right character to bring a martial arts movie to life, and so that was that I put my hand up and said I wanted to do Shang-Chi. That’s more or less the way it tends to happen, there’s a character we all want to do, or there’s a character one of us one of us wants to do, and we just talk about it and divide it up and things generally work out where people get to work on things they’re excited about.
Schwartz went into a little more detail about how some of those group talks play out, hinting at a very collaborative atmosphere under Kevin Feige‘s purview.
There definitely is a camaraderie for a lot of us who have been around for a long time just throwing ideas back and forth […] It’s great when you have people who have been through the process, and who you trust, and whose creative taste you trust, and everyone’s taste is different, and that’s part of what’s really useful about it. Not all of us see movies the same way, so we’re all able to bring something a little bit different.
The long-term togetherness and mentions of process and trust suggest the hallmarks of a high-performance team. Through Marvel Studios’ results and the way members of the Parliament talk about it, it’s clear the studio’s producing process is both organic and managed in a way that keeps things fresh and diverse. With the streaming TV and film combination creating new shared universe narratives, and new media formats on the horizon for Marvel Studios to adapt to, it will be exciting to see how the Parliament evolves.
