Given that Iron Man 3 was the last movie that Paramount Pictures was initially set to distribute before Disney acquired Marvel, Thor: The Dark World is really the first (excluding The Incredible Hulk) to open without the distribution partner's logo. While many expected Disney's logo to take its place, those who've seen The Dark World may have noticed the page-flipping Marvel logo has only been updated. Featured on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode this week and from now on, here's Marvel Studios' first logo and fanfare up-close as producer Kevin Feige explains its creation.
“We designed the very first Marvel logo for the first Spider-Man film,” Feige tells Marvel.com. “We’ve used that logo for eleven years, and with ‘Thor: The Dark World,’ it felt like a good time to update it because this is the very first film that only has the Marvel logo in front of it. You look back at the other films, and they’ve also featured our studio partners’ or distribution partners’ logos. But now that we are our own entity within the Walt Disney Company, it is only the Marvel logo in front of the movies. So that felt like the time to update it and have something that is more substantial as a standalone logo in front of our features.”
While Marvel wanted their own fresh opening logo, Kevin Feige admits that they didn't want to stray too far from the original comic book page flip logo. “The key was, we really loved that old flip logo,” the Producer suggests. “We didn’t want to re-invent the wheel, but we wanted it to feel bigger, to feel more substantial, which is why it starts with the flip, but suddenly it’s more dimensional as we go through the lettering and it reveals itself with the metallic sheen before settling into the white-on-red, well known Marvel logo, with the added flourish of the arrival and the announcement of the Studios at the bottom of the word Marvel.”
Thanks to Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World composer Brian Tyler, Marvel Studios now also have its fanfare to compliment the new logo. “My favorite part of it is, like all great studio logos, you need a fanfare, and we’d never had that before,” adds Feige. “We sometimes started the score of the movie, sometimes just had sound effects over it, sometimes had a song over it that leads into the beginning of the movie. So this is the first time that we have an actual, wonderful fanfare to accompany our logo. We turned to Brian Tyler to compose it for us, who this year has done two movies for us and two of what I believe to be two of the best scores in any Marvel Studios film, for ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘Thor: The Dark World.’ So he thankfully was willing to and happy to create a spectacular standalone fanfare for us.” What do you think?
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