“This meant working within the Marvel security bubble to build our own internal finishing suite with our own colorists inside,” he explains. While Marvel has strong partners in theatrical finishing off the lot, they decided to build a bigger mousetrap for this increased workload. “But we planned for it and had already changed and modified our work approach to do this extra work.” “So, our output as a studio increased dramatically as the pandemic struck,” he explains.
They additionally announced that Marvel was going to produce streaming shows, meaning six hours of content instead of two for a film. Up until the pandemic, Marvel was producing two to three movies a year, but just before the lockdown, the studio announced the Disney+ platform. How did Marvel deal with the pandemic? Well, with some fortuitous planning. “It’s not that we want everything to look the same,” he says, “but we are building a cinematic universe, so we want a viewpoint that threads throughout the whole thing.”Īside from about four weeks at the start of the pandemic, Jacobs has been on the Marvel lot, along with a few others, initially to deliver Black Widow for theatrical release. Jacobs compares his job, in a way, to a product manager for the visual side of Marvel, making sure there is consistency across all the shows. On a day-to-day basis, you’ll find Jacobs is sitting in on DI sessions with a variety of creative teams, saying things like, “Thor’s cape is the wrong color, it was this color in the other show.” With eight years at the studio, much of that information is in Jacobs’ head, but when in doubt he has the library of Marvel content to reference. Jacobs has the incredibly important job of, as he puts it, “carrying the ball through post production” for all the studios’ theatrical, streaming and marketing projects to make sure all the creative standards are met. We recently spoke to Marvel Studios’ Evan Jacobs for our NAB Season coverage.