Peter Cuneo Reveals Secret Strategies That Turned Marvel Studios Into a Billion-Dollar Empire | #Success - Ep. 86

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Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. Hey, what's up everybody? This is Russell and I have a really cool episode for you guys today. That's a little unique. So obviously typically we talk about marketing and sales and funnels and growth and everything here. But I got an email about a month ago from someone who, you know, I get these all the time from people like, hey, you should have so-and-so on your show. And some service just kind of spamming me with people's names all the time. I don't know how they get my email address, but they show up all the time. I ignore almost all of them. But this one popped through and said the guy was the CEO of Marvel, like the Marvel, like, you know, Marvel, like my favorite franchise of all time, all my favorite movies. And I was like, I would love to talk to that guy. And so I actually just finished the interview with him and it was really, really fascinating. I wanted to kind of, instead of just pushing play from the very beginning and running it through, there's some really interesting parts I wanted to pull out and talk about a little bit before we go ahead of time, because I think it'll make this interview even more fun and more exciting. So I'm actually gonna start with, where the podcast ended. At the end, we started asking him just, we asked him what his favorite Marvel movie was. And from there he started talking about it. And then we dived into character development story and some other really, really cool things. So I actually wanted to lead with that part of the interview first, 'cause that was the most fascinating. And we'll come back and then I'll set up kind of the other parts I think will be valuable for you. So that said, check out this part of the interview where I asked Peter, what his favorite Marvel movie was. I'm curious, from you spending time with Marvel, do you have a favorite Marvel movie?

I do, and it's actually not a movie that I made. I wouldn't make, when I was at Marvel, or, uh, any R-rated movies, because licensing is a wonderful business and highly profitable. Um, so, uh, if you have an R-rated movie, Walmart any big retailer is not going to put your toys on the shelf. You may not even have toys because they're R-rated. So I never did more than a PG-13. I can't even remember doing that. It's PG, at most. But Disney made a movie called Logan and it has to do with Wolverine. It's R-rated. It's a great story. It's about Wolverine getting old and his life. And he forms a particularly great bond with a young girl. And you have to see it. I can't do it justice. But see, I'm very big on character development. When we started at Marvel making movies, we had basically a simple formula. Big action scene to start, modest scene in the middle, big scene to finish, and everything else was character development. The way you get fans, the way you grow fans, is to get people interested in your characters. Part of that is knowing what they're good at. Part of that is knowing their failures, because all the Marvel characters have failures. They're not perfect. They're like us, they make some of the same mistakes. So it's the origin story, how they grow up, how do they get their powers, etc. So I just think that that's very important. And today, a lot of the movies, not just Marvel, are basically shoot 'em up, blow 'em up for most of the movie.

No storyline.

And characters show up that no one knows has ever even heard of. You know that, and the fans hate that, hate that. So the main characters, but if you, in entertainment in general, I have to tell you, Russell, whether it's film, audio, music, a book, any form of entertainment, play, the way you make a good piece of content is to form it so that the audience will be emotionally connected to some of the characters, even the bad characters, even the bad people. You know, which in Marvel there are a few, and there's still people that find them interesting. And you want them to root for them. Peter Parker can't get a date with the girl he really likes in high school, but he's Spider-Man. And he gets full of himself and he gets his uncle killed because of it. It's pretty heavy, but it's a good example. Tony Stark, I can tell you like Tony Stark. Tony has got a lot of problems. He's obnoxious at times. You know, he's full of himself also in many ways, and yet you love him. You know, I do. And, uh, and so on.

So, okay, I hope you enjoyed that part of it and got the wheels you had spinning just about, um, character development and story and the things that are so vital. We've been talking for years with you guys in Expert Secrets and other places about, uh, becoming the attractive character and sharing parts of yourself. But you notice what he talked about is like the best heroes that Stan Lee developed, they weren't the flawless ones. In fact, it was the reason why DC versus Marvel, why Marvel has traditionally beat DC, right? DC, it's like the characters are Superman who have no flaws, no issues, no one can mess with them, right? Other than this random kryptonite thing that they added to try to make him feel more like them, give him some weakness. But all of Stan Lee's characters were very much, they were flawed. They had their positives, like X-Men, they have these superpowers, but at the same time they're flawed. And the flaws is what makes you fall in love with people. It's the same thing why we always talk about with your audience, like when you're talking to them, you should, like, you can't just, share the highlight reel of all the cool things you've done. You also have to share the flaws. Like that's what actually like gets people to bond with you and to have rapport with you is sharing those parts of it, which is really, really fascinating. So I'm gonna jump back now earlier in the podcast interview where I asked him specifically about the turnaround he did with Marvel. What Peter's known for is he comes in and he takes companies that are struggling and he turns them around through leadership and through communication, a whole bunch of stuff. During this part of the interview, he's gonna talk about the actual Marvel turnaround. He's gonna go deep into some communication things that are really, really valuable. And then he's got a new book coming out. I asked him, I said, it's called Superhero Leadership. Like, of all the different leadership things that you learned through your years, like, I know the book's got like 20 or 30 different ones. I'm like, what are your two favorite, the two most powerful? And the two he shared I thought were really interesting and fascinating. So we're gonna jump into the Marvel startup turnaround, communication, and then the two most important leadership things you can learn from the guy who literally took took Marvel from a company who was going bankrupt, it was in bankruptcy, to selling to Disney for like $4.5 billion. So with that, so let's jump in this part of the interview. I'm curious with all the different turnarounds you've done, is the core thing you're bringing to those turnarounds when a company's struggling, is it leadership? Like the leading driver of what you're doing when you take a company and you're turning it around?

Well, obviously many, most of my turnarounds, Certainly the companies, the organizations got in trouble because of past leadership not doing the job. It's not always the case. Sometimes it's fundamental changes in an industry, but for the most part, that's the case. And so I always have a challenge walking through the door as the new CEO or the new president, whatever the title is, and, Everyone is afraid because there's a great air of uncertainty. You know, are we gonna, is the company gonna—

New leader coming in. Yeah, it's gonna be scary for a company.

Yeah, new leader, but what is, what's he like? But is the company gonna survive? Are the employees gonna keep their jobs? It's a very different challenge. What I do is, I have to say is, is, is, I don't know, I guess I'd say I'm doing severe, severe changes is what I have to do. All leaders are challenged in every organization, not only business, but wherever you could be a leader, a lot of other places, as you know., and you're going to be faced at some point with having to make change. Some people don't have to make very much change. Maybe they met, they lead through a couple of speed bumps, um, but, uh, and that's fine, that's great. But in my case, there were no speed bumps. It was all, uh, you know, a deep tissue operation, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And, uh, I became— this is not for everybody. In fact, you have to be weird to like doing this, and I— so I'm weird, you know. I don't know how that all happened, but I do— I'm addicted to taking on tough situations because I get a tremendous high when we are successful.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Marvel, because I think it'd be fascinating for people to hear that story. So When in the Marvel timeline was it that it was struggling in a spot where you came in, took over CEO, and turned it around? Either year-wise or like what was like between Iron Man 1 and 2 or where in the saga of—

Way, way before Iron Man. Okay. All right. So a little history. Marvel went into bankruptcy in 1996. And was in bankruptcy for 2 years, 1998. And as it came out of bankruptcy, I came in 1999 as the new CEO. One of the reasons I got to Marvel was I had done the previous turnaround. I had done— one of the owners of Marvel was also one of the owners of that business, a company called Remington Products. Talking about men's hair care. Yeah. Not guns. But Remington and one of the, you know, owners there saw what I had done and frankly, I made him a lot of money. And so when he was the leading shareholder of Marvel coming out of bankruptcy, Marvel was a public New York Stock Exchange company. And so he called me, hey, I need a CEO. That's kind of how it happened. I had no background in motion pictures or comic books. And most of my turnarounds, I was going into situations in an industry I had no experience with. So that was not unique. But I also think it was an advantage because frankly, you could see some of what's out of whack, what's crazy, pretty quickly. You know, you don't have to be an instant expert. And so Marvel had several different challenges. One, the financial setup, well, coming out of bankruptcy, everyone usually thinks if they haven't been through a bankruptcy that you're now cured financially. You come out of bankruptcy and you got plenty of money and so on and so forth. The reality is the only thing you really have is what the secured lenders and other people would agree to, the creditors would agree to. And in Marvel's case, like most cases, it was not the best situation for Marvel. So we had to go to work on that to fix that. The second thing is there had been a lot of flight for talent. A lot of good people, particularly in the comic book area, had left during the 2-year bankruptcy. And they didn't see light at the end of the tunnel. They could get a good or better job because they were good.

And they were— Was Marvel this time more, uh, like complete comic books, or were they also doing movies at this time when you, when you stepped in?

I'm gonna get— I'll get into that in a second. Okay. I'll give, give you the timing. So we had to get that, you know, we had to get that back. And then the culture of the company, the value system was, you know, needed to change. And what we came up with, and I had a great board, to support me with some other turnaround people on the board was that we— our culture became, we're going to change the rules of the game. We're not going to make movies like other people. We're not going to make comic books. And I think the rest is history because that's exactly what we did. It's always risky to change the rules for a whole industry. But we were all risk takers, as I said, adventurers. So yeah, those are the big challenges.

Can I ask a quick follow-up? You said that you didn't do comic books and you didn't do movies?

I had no background before I came to the company in movies or comic books. So I was learning on the job. But one of the things that I will take a lot of credit for is I didn't pretend that I was an instant expert. For example, I would read scripts, but I never made a single change because I didn't feel qualified. I didn't know the characters. You know, comic books, I never read a comic book before it was published. I read most of them after they came out. I was learning about— but I'll take— I like to say I take credit for staying out of the way of some really great content producers. And we, as I said, had a talent drain, but we got a lot of those people back. Oh, it took a while, but they all came back, most of them. So, but so when I came to the 1999, my first month, I went to Toronto, Canada, to the set where they were filming X-Men 1. That was the first film for the new Marvel, if you will. I can't take credit for getting us in the movie world. It was done already before I came, and they were actually filming the first big film. And so on. And X-Men 1 came out a year later. It was a gigantic hit, as you may know. And we were off to the races. So that's way before Tony Stark, you know, and Iron Man. Iron Man came out— we were partnered with big studios for the first 5 or 6 years that I was there. So we did— we didn't know how to make movies. So we were partnered on Spider-Man with Sony, on the X-Men with Fox. On Hulk with Universal and others. Okay. And so on. And it wasn't until 2006, I was no longer CEO, I was Vice Chairman of the Board in 2006. So I, I had been the CEO for almost 4 years, from '99 to the, to the end of 2003. And then I'd been on the board. So it's now 2006. And we decided to rejuvenate Marvel Studios, there had been a, a brief attempt in the early '90s to start a Marvel studio. But we decided to do that, and, uh, that was 2006. We raised over $500 million for the studio, and Iron Man 1 came out in 2008 and was also a gigantic hit. So give you a little bit of a timeline, and then You know, we, we eventually sold to Disney on the last day, December 31st of 2009. So I had been with Marvel 10 years at that point.

Mm-hmm. That's so cool. And then at that point, did you exit after the, after the sale and kind of go to the next, the next big project?

Were you still involved? Yeah. No, no, none of the board members were kept. By Disney. They didn't need us. I mean, you know, so it was, it was time to move on to the next challenge. But yeah, I think that Marvel is a great example though of taking risks, which is what you have to do to do, you know, to do a really surgical approach. To a turnaround. And it takes time. Nobody understands everything the minute they walk through the door. And I always do a lot of homework when I'm asked to do a turnaround. And, but you can do tons of homework and still be surprised. In fact, I honestly say on my 7 turnarounds, it was worse than I thought it was in every one. When you got there. Through the door.

Yeah. I'm curious, when you, when you go into a turnaround, do you have like, is there a playbook you go off? Like, here's the, here's the step-by-step process we take somebody through. Is it more kind of search and discovery and then trying to fix problems as you find them? Or what does that look like for you?

Very good question, actually. And I have to say that I don't have a playbook. I don't, you know, I'm going in and I just want to— first thing I want to do is establish what the changes are that are needed. And, you know, I like to talk sometimes about pet rocks, pebbles, and boulders in a pond. And for anybody in an organization, if, you know, let's call the pond is your organization. And it's not just business. I mean, you could be in the military. You could be in government. You could be any number of different places. Where you're a leader. And when you've decided, you know, figured out what the, some changes become, are very readily apparent after a month or two. Some take longer to really, to really understand. And I used to say, I mentioned to you that I have on my podcast, petercunio.com, excuse me, on my website, petercunio.com, there are 28 essentials for superhero leadership. And one of them used to be— there used to be more— was make as many changes as you can all at once so the healing in the organization can begin because you could tell people we're done making changes. But the truth is, as I thought more about that, it's very hard to do. And it could be a mistake to make all the changes at once early on. Going back to the pond. Okay. So you have some changes, think of them as pebbles. Toss them in the pond. There's a tiny little ripple, lasts a couple of seconds, and it's gone. So the effect on the pond, the effect on your organization is quite small. Gonna be no real issues, what have you. Some changes are a rock. They make a big, they make a bigger splash. Some of them skip and make multiple splashes. So there, and again, they, they make a bigger ripple, but the ripple never really hits the shore. Then there's boulders. And so there's a cliff next to your pond and a boulder falls off and goes in the pond and a big wave comes off the boulder and hits all of the, all the, if you will, the coastline of your, of your pond. And what you want to do is, once you realize what pebbles you want to drop, what rocks, what boulders, you make sure that you do it so that they don't intersect each other, because then you're getting an extra problem. Okay, if the wakes, the ripples of these rocks, if you drop them all at once, have you ever seen what happens when they hit each other? It's really disruptive. And sometimes change that you want to make It's not, you think of it as, oh, I need to change this consumer. I'll make this up. Consumer service department's not doing well. I gotta make a couple of changes. You know, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna bring in some other people to do things. And that's fine. But you have to think through, okay, what will the changes in consumer or customer service You know, what, what, what other areas will they affect? So it's not just the effect in that particular area. You know, what do the salespeople need to know? How will it affect how they behave? Okay, so, uh, it's very important to think through when and how you make the changes so that you minimize those ripples and waves and everything else bumping into each other in your pond.

Yeah, very interesting. So besides Marvel, uh, and Remington, where, where were some of the other, uh, turnarounds that you participated in?

Well, I, I, uh, I, I was with, uh, Black Decker, and I did, uh, 3— I, I had 6 divisions, 3 turned out to need turnaround attention. And before that, I was with a company called Clairol, women's hair care. Uh, and I did two inside of, uh, Claro was owned at that time by Bristol Myers, very big company. So my first two turnarounds were there and they were really divisions of a very large company. Mm-hmm. Rather than a standalone organization.

Okay. Cool. I'm curious, like, um, obviously with a turnaround, I'm assuming you're going in when things are kind of in a crisis mode and they're struggling. But if someone's listening to this and they have a business that's successful and it's not so much they're in crisis mode, but obviously they wanna learn like the, the most important principles, whether it be leadership or other stuff to be able to like just rapidly start growing their business. Where, what would be like your, 'cause I'm not sure the companies you're working with now, if they're, if they're turnarounds or if they're more just companies that you're coming into and taking your expertise to, to grow 'em and scale 'em. Like does it look different if it's, if it's a growth type thing versus a, versus a turnaround when you start working with a company?

Well, I often get asked about startups. And there are parallels between startups and turnarounds. There's a degree of uncertainty. It's certainly taking risks and whatever. So some of the elements are really very similar. And I would say a couple of things. First of all, particularly in startups, and I've been connected to a couple of successful startups, but all of them really the original idea that the founder or founders thought would work didn't work and they pivoted. I've had this in— I mentioned I've been in tech the last 6 or 7 years. And they— I've seen some fail I wasn't involved in where the founders just couldn't admit to themselves that their original idea didn't work or needed modification. And so ego is an important part in the early stages of a startup. In the case of my AI company based in San Francisco, I've been chairman for 7 years. We've pivoted the tech twice before we really hit on what, on something special, twice. So that's why, you know, 7 years and so on. So very important to keep an open mind. Make changes where they're obviously needed. If you're a leader, listen to what other people encourage people to talk to you, even if, you know, and over time get them to trust that if they have bad news or things they would think you're not doing right, that they'll come to you and not be afraid to talk to you candidly about some of those things. I always try to have a situation where You know, people knew that if they spoke to me candidly, there was trust. I was never going to quote them to anyone else. You know, and once they see that you're not kidding, you don't do that, then it gets much easier. People jump. So I think the candid— the other thing is communications. Communications is a lost art in many places. I'm very surprised that the Poor communications I see, particularly of course in businesses that are in trouble or in organizations that are dysfunctional. The leaders don't communicate well. You must communicate regularly, consistently. You should be telling everyone the same thing. You know, weak leaders basically are just parroting whatever the last person was they talked to. And so they're constantly giving different messages to the organization. And the organization is very uncomfortable. They have no idea what people are trying to do to make the company a success. I sometimes tell the story about pizza lunches. So what I like to do when I was first coming into an organization was I would have pizza lunches. So I'd have maybe 10 employees from all different levels and different functions. We'd have an hour and bring in pizzas. And I was always amazed because early on in these turnarounds, shockingly, even in small organizations, the people had never met each other in many cases, including having cubicles practically right next to each other. On the same floor. And you know, that to me right away, okay, Bill, you know, alarms are going off when I see that right away. But I would, I'd use that to talk a little while about what I'm seeing, or, you know, and then I would say at the last maybe 20 minutes of an hour, are there any questions? And when I first started these, of course, in an organization, There were no questions. Now, I know they were dying to ask me questions, but what I would do is simply say, you know, if I were you, I'd have this question, and I'd ask, bring up the elephant in the room, so to speak, and I would answer where I was on that. And then after 3 or 4 of these, all of a sudden, people were starting to ask questions because the word got around. I'm not afraid of tough questions. I bring them up myself. And people started, they saw I wasn't mad, you know, or whatever. I wanted to hear from them. Another element of communications is even if you really want to hear everybody's ideas, even the craziest ideas, because people, you know, people have strong feelings and you may make a decision as a leader to go in one direction when a particular individual recommended something different. But if they feel that you took them seriously, took their views seriously, wanted to hear from them, listen closely— okay, you didn't go in the direction they were espousing, but actually you won't— they'll, they'll, they'll be fine. They'll be fine because you, you proved to them that you took them seriously, and there'll be another time. You'll be back around on something else. Um, and so I tried to, even when I sort of knew the answers, if you will, I just wanted people to— I wanted to listen, you know, and, uh, encourage risk-taking, crazy ideas, what have you.

That's really cool. So your new book that you're— that's coming out in February, you said it's called Superhero Leadership Skills. That—

did I get that right? Uh, it's, it's called, uh, it's called, uh, Superhero Leadership: The 28 Essentials for Superhero Leadership with Peter Cunio.

Obviously we don't have time to go through all 28, but if, if there was like one or two of those leadership principles you think are like the most essential and most important, what would those be, do you think?

Tough question.

Very tough question. Like, I love them all.

They're all my babies. I'll give you, uh, we, we, we just covered, you know, communications is I think number 3 or something. On the list. But what I often get asked is, what's the toughest one to achieve? Because these are a list of philosophies, behaviors, you know, of principles and so on for good leadership. And the one that I always answer that question with is, happens to be number 18. Which basically says that you have to be comfortable as a leader being unpopular because change always upsets some people, even good change, because it's change. And there are people who will be upset, people who will not like it. And most human beings don't aspire to leadership because they know fundamentally that if they're in a leadership position, they're going to have to make change, and they're going to make some people unhappy. And most human beings, we all want to be liked by everybody. We really don't want to upset anybody else, not usually. And so people don't aspire to leadership positions for that reason. So you have to be mentally comfortable. It doesn't mean you like it. Don't get me wrong. And you don't want to hurt people on purpose. Of course not. You know, you don't want to be abusive at all, okay? But in the end, you have to be comfortable that you're going to be, you know, unpopular. And you may stay unpopular forever with some people. It's happened to me. I get a call from, from, uh, recently from someone I've known a long time. They said, Peter, do you know Mr. XYZ. I said, yeah, we worked together about 10 years ago. Peter, you know, I have to tell you, he doesn't like you very much. And I said, yeah, well, here's the reasons. And, uh, and so on. And, and so, you know, so there will be people who will never give up saying this guy Cuneo is a bum, and that's okay. I can live with it. It's not not fun, but to be an effective leader, to make the changes required, you know, you, you have to be comfortable being unpopular.

Yeah, that's a tough one for sure.

It's— yeah, and you know, most people— I'll just leave you with this on this subject— most human beings want to say, oh, um, you know, it's— I had to make these changes, it's someone else's fault, or someone else suggested it or whatever. And, you know, you have to own it. You have to own certain things. And it's actually how you build trust. When I've made mistakes, I tell the organization, I made a mistake. It wasn't someone else, it wasn't bad luck. I made a mistake. And, you know, we're gonna fix it right away. Let's talk about it. It's obviously I blew it. And Weak leaders never want to admit they made a mistake. So people will appreciate that. And I say to the organization, bring me your problems. Everyone has problems. We're all human. I know you have problems. What keeps me up at night is not knowing about the problems that I should know about. Okay? And I feel we as a group, 99%, can solve the problem together. You will not get in trouble with me for asking for help bringing a problem. You will get in trouble with me if you don't.

All right, so I hope you guys enjoyed the interview with Peter and hopefully got some ideas about your character development, about startups, about turning around, about communication, about leadership, and all the amazing things. Like I said, he's got a great podcast. You should go check it out called Superhero Leadership. He's got a book coming out in February, I believe, about superhero leadership as well. Because I think for all of us, no matter what area in life you're at, if you're an employee of a company, you've got to learn leadership skills. If you are the CEO or the entrepreneur in a company, you got to learn leadership skills. If you're trying to be someone who's speaking externally to people, we've got to all master leadership skills in our home, in our family, at work, and any place that we've got any kind of stewardship. So I hope you have a chance to plug into his training and his leadership books. I'm excited to read them and go deep with them. And with that said, appreciate you all, and I will see you guys all on the next episode.

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