If you’ve seen Thor: The Dark World, then you’ll have no doubt noticed that the latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe opened with a new company logo, coinciding with the end of Marvel Studios’ initial distribution deal with Paramount Pictures. Speaking to the official Marvel site, studio chief Kevin Feige has explained the reason for the change…
“We designed the very first Marvel logo for the first Spider-Man film. 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. The key was, we really loved that old flip logo. 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.”
As well as the updated logo, there’s also the addition of fanfare, created by Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World composer Brian Tyler, and Feige explained how that came about: ” My favorite part of it is, like all great studio logos, you need a fanfare, and we’d never had that before. 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.”
If you’re yet to see the new Marvel Studios logo, you can watch it here….
Originally published November 13, 2013. Updated April 15, 2018.
