On December 28, 2022, the same day as his birthday, Disney announced a documentary for the life and times of the great Stan Lee, exclusively for their streaming platform Disney+. After his death in 2018, he is missed much by his comic and movie fans. His last cameo in a Marvel movie was in Avengers: Endgame, a fitting stop for the long-running series of movies since it was the climax of everything they build for so many years with Thanos, and it marked the end of an era with Tony Stark’s death. It is time for his return to our screens, this time we will see his story.

He was in the epicenter of one of the most creative eras in comics, the silver age. He was behind the creation of many characters that are still at the height of their popularity, like Spider-Man and the X-Men, characters that met incredible success many years after their creation like Iron Man and Thor, and characters that lost some of their recognition over the years but are set to return like the Fantastic Four. During his career, he worked alongside some absolute legends in the comic book industry, big names like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Now we are going to see Disney’s version of events.

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What We Want to See

     Marvel Studios

The life and times of Stan Lee is a good selling point in itself. We want to see his part in making Marvel Comics what it is today, the biggest movie franchise of our times. We want to see the way he shaped the world of comic books besides the scripting, how he managed publicity, and the business side of things, he was excellent at that. We want to hear from other comic book creators about the ways he inspired them.

We also want to hear how he felt about his legacy. Was he proud enough, did he have any regrets because he never managed to write his novels? We want to learn about Stan Lee the person and Stan Lee the personality, not exclusively for only one of the two. For this, we hope that the documentary uses archival footage to show Lee’s thoughts in his own words.

What We Don’t Want to See

We do not need an absolute glorification of the man. It is not an unpopular opinion that Stan Lee was a prolific writer, but he was not necessarily a good writer. It is a well-known fact that he was not able to write complete scripts for all the comic series he used to write, he gave a brief synopsis of a story and the description of some scenes, and the artist had to create all the artwork based on that.

After all that, Lee returned to the comic and add the dialogue. All the artists felt like they deserved way more credits than they received, and it is true that Lee said that he considered them co-creators, but that’s the catch. He considered them, not that they were actual co-creators, so in a hypothetical court, Marvel Comics could argue that Lee’s opinions are his own, they are not facts. So let us hope that in this documentary we will not see Stan Lee as a god, solely the creator of a universe full of wonder and marvel, but as a part of a bigger collaboration that needed the talents of so many people, many of them even more important than the man himself.

We also do not need to see a lie, like he was full of energy until his last days. The truth is that he was sick, and he did not have the energy to keep going to conventions and movie premieres or doing cameos and giving interviews. He did all that because he was popular, and many people made money out of him, but it would be really weird if Disney made something that made them look bad. On the other hand, dishonesty is extra hurtful in documentaries. The last thing we need is an extended commercial for all the Marvel movies.

Stan Lee was a creative man, a hard worker, and a man of many talents. Maybe it is not great that he was known for a talent of his that was not his strongest, writing, but it is what it is. We look forward to seeing this documentary about the person who was a big part of the success of so many characters we still enjoy on our comic-book pages and our screens.

It is way too early to have a date for that. All we know is that it is going to drop sometime in 2023.