Anna Daniels
It all started, innocently enough, with an email after BossLogic had been creating fan edits featuring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. He recalls, “The Russo Brothers reached out to me after I was making mock-up posters for the Avengers. [They] reached out to me and told me to come visit them when I’m in L.A.”
Things, however, would rapidly escalate from there. “It was messaged in an e-mail, so it didn’t feel like it was too crazy,” says BossLogic. “But when I went to L.A. and I got there and went into their studio, I went into their office and stuff.”
That might seem like sacred ground for fans of the MCU, but apparently, Joe Russo isn’t the kind to play high and mighty. “He was the most chill dude, Joe Russo. We just talked shop. He was telling me how much he loved my work, and he put me in contact with the heads of Disney, and got me on Endgame,” BossLogic recalls. “And from then, we’ve done a few jobs together.”
This embrace of an artist who’s made a name working with copyright-protected characters and content is a fairly new thing for Hollywood. In the past, big corporations like Disney — which owns Marvel Studios — would come down on fans creating their own takes on properties such as the Avengers, but there’s definitely been a shift in recent years. To what does BossLogic attribute the change that would lead to the Russos enthusiastically embracing his work? “I think it was the social network age,” he says. “Studios pay thousands and thousands, even millions, to advertise their stuff, and people are just advertising it for them, I think some studios may actually like that […] For instance, if a TikTok influencer took something about a movie and that goes global, gets a million hits, that’s millions of hits that they didn’t pay a cent for, and that’s money for them.”
Written by: Looper
