In the early days of Marvel Studios, Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter assembled a group of individuals he called the Creative Committee. Composed of Marvel Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, Marvel Comics publisher Dan Buckley, Marvel Entertainment President Alan Fine and Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, the Creative Committee provided feedback on each project as it developed.
Following a series of events that left him frustrated by the Creative Committee, Feige nearly left Marvel before a deal was struck with Disney CEO Bob Iger in 2015 that allowed for significant restructuring. As a result, Feige reported directly to Disney chair Alan Horn, pruning Perlmutter and his creative committee out of the film branch of Marvel Entertainment.
Beginning with 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Marvel Studios began producing films without the influence of Perlmutter ‘s creative committee; however, before long, Feige began assembling his own team to help guide projects behind the scenes. First acknowledged in the credits of Black Panther, a collection of Marvel Studios’ long timers known as the Marvel Studios Parliament have been quietly helping to craft each MCU project.
Feige’s original roster was made up of Stephen Broussard, Eric Hauserman Carroll, Jonathan Schwartz, Trinh Tran and Brad Winderbaum, all of whom worked their way up the ladder and served as producers on several Marvel Studios projects. Nate Moore, who co-produced Captain America: The Winter Soldier before producing Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther, joined the team for Avengers: Endgame.
Since 2018, a member of the Parliament has served as a producer or executive producer on each project; however, it’s a collaborative effort that gets the ball rolling.”There definitely is a camaraderie for a lot of us who have been around for a long time just throwing ideas back and forth,” said Schwartz, who was an executive producer on cosmic corner projects such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and The Marvels while also producing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
“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,” Schwartz told us in 2021. “Not all of us see movies the same way, so we’re all able to bring something a little bit different.”
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.
-Jonathan Schwartz
In a 2022 interview with CinemaBlend, Moore explained that while the primary focus of the Parliament was to act as a “brain trust”, the team did also work as a cohesive continuity police, helping bring together info from Marvel Studios andarbel Television to avoid confusion. “I would say that’s certainly not just our responsibility,” said Moore of monitoring continuity, “because we have colleagues across both the movies and the shows who aren’t technically in Parliament, but who are incredibly instrumental in making sure the continuity maintains itself and that our different properties don’t step on each other.“
Parliament is essentially those of us who’ve been with the company for longer than we want to admit who sort of help each other with ideas across all the properties, regardless of whether it’s my movie or Jonathan [Schwartz]’s movie or Stephen [Broussard] ‘s movie. And so yeah, it’s nothing more than that. We kind of came up with the name as a lark and it kind of stuck, and now I’m forced to answer questions from my friends, like, ‘What’s Parliament?’ I’m like, ‘Oh boy.’ It really is just kind of a brain trust to help elevate the movies when we can.
-Nate Moore
For five years, the Parliament stayed intact and worked to shepherd 25ish projects through the pre and post-production processes. Following Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Carroll, who co-produced Spider-Man: Homecoming before working as an executive producer on Spider-Man: Far From Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, was no longer credited as a member of the team.
Beginning with 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel Studios longtime Head of Visual Development, Ryan Meinerding, filled the seat vacated by Carroll. In December 2024, Feige revealed that Moore was leaving Marvel Studios to pursue a new career trajectory. While it’s unclear what Moore’s last project as a member of Parliament might be, he will be working with the studio again in the future as a producer on the as-yet-undated Black Panther 3.
With Moore’s scheduled departure, it’s unclear if Feige will once again look to add to the team’s roster. As it stands, original members Broussard, Schwartz, Tran and Winderbaum, who also oversees Marvel Television and Marvel Animation, join Meinerding as the current iteration of the “brain trust” as the studio looks not only to continue to rebound from a rough couple of years but also bring the Multiverse Saga to a satisfying conclusion while also preparing to launch whatever comes next.
Disney did not respond to our request for comments on Meinerding’s addition to the Parliament.
Source: Cinemablend
