Avi Arad (/ˈɑːvi ˈɑːrɑːd/; Hebrew: אבי ארד; born August 1, 1948) is an Israeli-American studio executive and producer of film, television, and animation. He became the CEO of Toy Biz in the 1990s, was the chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment, and is the founder, former chairman, and former CEO of the latter's successor, Marvel Studios. Since then, he has produced and sometimes written a wide array of live-action, animated, and television comic book adaptations, including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Arad was born in 1948 in Ramat Gan, Israel, to a Jewish family. The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland, he grew up reading Superman and Spider-Man comics translated into Hebrew. In 1965, he was conscripted as a soldier into the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). He fought and was wounded in the 1967 Six-Day War and spent 15 days...read more