Happy birthday, Nicole Perlman! Today, we’re celebrating this heroic screenwriter.
Nicole Perlman’s career started off with a bang; after joining Marvel’s screenwriting program in 2009, a program in which Marvel gathered together several writers and paid them to develop scripts for movies, Nicole was given the choice of a few different Marvel stories to base a screenplay on. She chose Guardians of the Galaxy. By 2012, director James Gunn was attached to the film, which was then released in 2014. This made Nicole the first woman to write a Marvel Studios movie.
The film was a huge success, grossing over $700 million at the box office and racking up two Academy Award nominations, two British Academy Film Awards, and two Critics’ Choice Awards. In a review of Guardians, FF2 Contributor Brigid Presecky says, “Humor and heart blend with the action that propels the film forward” and that “Despite featuring an abundance of intergalactic characters, the development of the relationships between them keeps each one captivating.”
In 2018, Nicole made her directorial debut with the short film The Slows, an adaptation of a short story by Gail Haraven that appeared in the New Yorker. The Slows is a futuristic film about a divided society; half of society embraces technology that allows them to circumvent regular aging, while the other half retreats into nature and accepts the natural course of life.
In 2019, Nicole co-wrote the story to the popular film Pokémon Detective Pikachu, a mystery film based loosely on the 2016 video game of the same name. The film follows Pikachu and friends as they attempt to solve the disappearance of a Pokémon trainer’s father. It was beloved by Pokémon fans worldwide. Also at this time, Nicole made another contribution to the MCU, by writing the story for Captain Marvel. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel was another huge success, grossing over $1 billion worldwide. While the film was directed by a woman, it’s also clear that a woman was behind the story as well. As FF2 contributor Sophia Jin states, “Throughout the movie, Brie Larson’s character Carol was seen to be questioned in her abilities, being manipulated left, right, and center. However, this film was really empowering, because despite people attempting to shoot her down, she proved herself more powerful than they expected.”
Nicole started with a bang and has kept the spark alive for over a decade. She is now an Executive Producer for Fast and Furious 10, which is set to come out in 2023. With all of her contributions to a generally male-dominated film genre, one could say that Nicole is her own kind of superhero.
© Julia Lasker (12/10/2022) FF2 Media
LEARN MORE/DO MORE
Read Sophia Jin’s celebration of Nicole Perlman here.
Read Brigid Presecky’s review of Guardians of the Galaxy here.
Read Sophia Jin’s review of Captain Marvel here.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Nicole Perlman on set of Guardians of the Galaxy (Photo credit: Marvel Studios).
