To the people who are worried about Eric Pearson polishing the Fantastic Four script: don't. If there's one thing he's good at, it's polishing and doctoring scripts - A rundown of Eric Pearson's history inside the company and his very active involvement throughout the entire MCU
For those out of the loop, there was a new THR article yesterday which revealed the fact that Eric Pearson is polishing the FF script before production starts this Summer.
The article credits Eric Pearson as the writer of Black Widow and Ragnarok, and that information is what most news sites and social media pages ran with, forgetting to mention Pearson's work as a script doctor inside Marvel Studios.
As a teenager, Eric Pearson aspired to be an actor, but he was "pretty bad at it" (his words), so he studied to be a screenwriter instead. After constant failure to break into the industry for a few years after college, he was ready to move out of Hollywood, when Marvel Studios, after the great success of Iron Man and the Disney buy-out, created the Marvel Writer's Program in 2009, to groom in-house writers.
The program asked young writers to choose 1 of the 3 D-list Marvel characters and pitch movies around them. The options were Cloak and Dagger, Eternals and Ares, all of them being movies that Marvel Studios were considering making at the time (along with Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Runaways and Power Pack), because they didn't have the rights to their most popular characters.
Pearson tried to overcompensate and wrote a pitch for Cloak and Dagger and one for Ares, before Marvel told them to just choose one and he went with Cloak and Dagger. After a 1-hour meeting with Kevin Feige where he pitched the movie, he was hired.
His first job inside the studio was to work closely with producer Brad Winderbaum on fleshing out the universe and expanding its canon. Winderbaum was an assistant of Marvel Studios Co-President Louis D'Esposito during the first Iron Man movie and afterwards, he was tasked with spear-heading and overseeing the expansion of the MCU through the tie-in comics and the One-Shots.
Thus, Pearson's job was to write those One-Shots as well as the very popular tie-in comic "Fury's big week". The very idea that Iron Man 2, TIH and Thor would all take place within the same week, which is the premise of the comic, was Winderbaum and Pearson's idea to better flesh out the universe and connect its different corners to prepare the ground for the upcoming Avengers movie. Eventually, right before the Avengers was released, Winderbaum created and released the first official MCU Timeline.
The last One-Shot that Pearson wrote, the Agent Carter one-shot (All Hail the King was written by the Iron Man 3 writers), was the D'Esposito, Winderbaum, Pearson, Markus and McFeely's passion project and a pitch/test footage to prove to Iger that an Agent Carter series would work. Iger had recently created Agents of SHIELD to keep MCU fans engaged year-round on the small screen and fill out the time between the movies with more MCU stories and lore. So, he greenlit Agent Carter for ABC and all 5 of the above men were very involved with its production, which is why Marvel Studios is credited as co-producing the show along with Marvel Television (the only time this happened). Pearson specifically, was a story editor for the series and wrote 8 out of its 18 episodes.
After the show was unceremoniously cancelled, Pearson essentially became Marvel Studios' go-to script doctor. His job was to come in after all the previous writers had done all the work and add the finishing touches, change small plot details/lines/jokes etc. We know for a fact that he did this at least with the scripts of Ant-Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Infinity War and Endgame, but it's very likely he had a hand in almost all Phase 3 projects.
In 2016, after comic book veterans Craig Kyle (writer and producer of the Thor films) and Christopher Yost (writer of Thor: The Dark World and showrunner of Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes) had already written the first draft of Thor: Ragnarok, which was then supposed to be a dark, hefty film about Asgard's destruction, Taika Waititi joined the film and wanted to add a lot more humour and flair in the film, including a side plot which would adapt the Planet Hulk storyline.
Since Brad Winderbaum was the producer overseeing Thor: Ragnarok, he brought Pearson in to rework Kyle and Yost's script to make this work, but he ended up doing so much work on the script, he got his first proper credit as a writer on a live-action movie.
Thus, when Winderbaum was given the reins of the Black Widow movie and the script of that had been rewritten 2 times already (by Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson), with director Cate Shortland not being happy with either of them, Winderbaum brought Pearson in to rewrite the script from scratch based on the general story outline that Schaeffer and Benson had created. Pearson's script ended up being the final one.
After Black Widow released, Brad Winderbaum became Head of Marvel Studios TV, Animation and Streaming in August 2021 and his assistant, Brian Chapek (Bob's son) who had worked as a producer on Ragnarok and Black Widow as well, took on the reins of Thunderbolts and of course hired Pearson to write the first draft, which would have been his first time writing the first draft of a live-action movie. I am guessing both because the movie was more or less a semi-sequel to BW, but also because both men had worked so closely with Winderbaum for so long, they had probably become close collaborators themselves.
After Marvel Studios hired Jake Schreier as the director of Thunderbolts though, he decided to make the movie less of a Black Widow sequel and he hired his Beef co-creator and showrunner Lee Sung Jin to write a new script, although probably based off of Pearson's story.
Now, Joana Callo, writer on Beef and showrunner of the Bear is polishing the Thunderbolts script, while Pearson is polishing the FF script, written by Josh Friedman & Cameron Squires.
I personally think both will do a great job and I can't wait to see these 2 movies next year!
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