Marvel Studios, LLC, formerly known as
Marvel Films, is an American film and television production company. Marvel Studios is the creator of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a media franchise and shared universe of films and television series produced by the studio, based on characters that appear in Marvel Comics publications. The studio was founded in 1993 by Avi Arad as part of Marvel Entertainment and has been led by producer Kevin Feige, who serves as its president, since 2007. The studio originally licensed the film rights to several Marvel characters before beginning to produce its own films in 2004, and has since regained many of those rights. It has been owned by the Walt Disney Company since 2009, and has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios since August 2015, where it is part of Disney Entertainment. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures has distributed most of the studio's films since
The Avengers (2012).