10 Things You Didn't Know About The Marvel Cinematic Universe

3. Kevin Feige Came Up With The Idea For The MCU When He Realised Marvel Still Had The Rights To Most Of The Avengers

Back in 2005, Marvel were making relatively little profit through the licensing of their most iconic characters, like Spider-Man and the X-Men, to big movie studios. Keen to produce their own films, however, the eureka movie struck when Kevin Fiege - Marvel bigshot - realised that, although they lacked the rights to some infamous superheroes, they still retained the rights to the key members of... you guessed it: The Avengers. Upon discovering this, Fiege - a self-confessed fanboy - pondered the possibility of a shared cinematic universe, consisting of several solo movies, leading into a crossover, much akin to the Marvel comic books of the 1960s. To make it so, Marvel took out a huge loan ($525 million, if you're wondering) and set about on crafting the first movie in what would become one of cinema's biggest ever movie franchises: Iron Man. Yay!