How a Marvel Studios project killed a crew member
While the movie industry is still colonised by costumed crime fighters, unions are the real marvel. No industry, from front of house to movies to public transport and everything in between, should go without them.
Unabashed good things are vanishingly rare in this cursed world, yet unions are pretty close to being one of them. If we’re going to make people work for a living, they deserve to not only be paid a fair wage for their labour but also have their health protected while doing so. It’s depressing that this is becoming a somewhat controversial opinion nowadays, but in fairness, people do seem to assume that corporations will do this when left to their own devices.
This is despite the centuries of history we have that show that corporations don’t even pay people when left unchecked. Wages are, after all, something of an inconvenience to big companies. It’s unions that protect workers’ fundamental rights.
To call this important barely covers it, because making movies is actually a surprisingly dangerous business. One that even with the protection afforded to its workers can still have tragic consequences. What’s more, it’s not just scrappy, low-budget film sets that cut corners that can have truly horrific accidents occur on them, but sets run by the biggest, most powerful and, yes, richest corporations in Hollywood.
Take this example from February 2024, where a crew member of a Marvel Studios project died in a tragic accident.
What was this Marvel project?
According to the trade publication Deadline, which reported the news, the crew member was a rigger who had fallen from the rafters of one of the studio sets the project was shooting in – LAPD later confirmed that the crew member was the 41-year-old Juan Carlos Osorio of Temple City, California, they also confirmed that no foul play was suspected and that this had been nothing more than the kind of tragic accident that is a risk on any film set this size.
The depressing irony of all this is that the project Osorio was working on, Wonder Man, ended up being far from the typical Marvel Studios project filled with the dangerous stunts, pyrotechnics and prop guns that have caused so many on-set accidents in the past. By and large, it’s a fairly quiet drama about a jobbing actor trying to land a major movie role while trying to hide his superpowers. There are barely any real action sequences or stunts to be found.
In fact, it’s the kind of show that takes five minutes of screentime to show Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley quoting Shakespeare monologues back and forth at each other. It’s a genuine breath of fresh air in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet, despite that, despite all those behind-the-scenes clips of Tom Holland swinging down Glasgow’s St Vincent Street with pyrotechnics going off behind him and cars speeding around underneath him, Wonder Man was the project that someone died on.
It just goes to show that you can never tell what’s going to happen on a movie set, and thus, any protection the workers on those sets can get is desperately needed.