In a
recent interview with collider, Kevin Feige, Marvel’s Studios President talked
about Iron Man 3, The Avengers 2, Doctor Strange, The Guardians of the Galaxy,
Falcon and War Machine Films.
“Collider: A lot of people are discussing Robert Downey
Jr.’s contract and how it will impact the Avengers sequel and Iron Man
movies. But I think the bigger question
is, when does your contract end?
KEVIN
FEIGE: You’re the first person that’s
ever asked me that question.
I
think a lot of people should be asking that question because being honest,
there is a reason why all the Marvel movies are good and I think it has your
name on it.
FEIGE: Oh, that’s very nice. My contract negotiations are not nearly as
exciting as Mr. Downey’s. I’m here for a
while, certainly through Phase Two.
Do
you see yourself still running Marvel in five years?
FEIGE: I don’t know, the truth of the matter is, I
always sort of set a goal or set a horizon line and look towards that. Then
say, “Once I get to that horizon line I will see where we stand.” For a long time it wasX-Men 2 and then for a
long time it was Iron Man and Incredible Hulk – are we going to be a studio by
then or not? Is it going to work or is
it not? Then it was Avengers, now
it’sAvengers 2. So, two years after
that, three years after that, I can’t even begin to guess.
I
put on Twitter and Facebook that I was going to be talking to you and there
were a ton of people that submitted questions.
I’m going to try to breeze through them, some of them are really
good. First one: You guys have take directors that many
studios have passed over and they’re turning in fantastic movies. What’s the secret formula that other studios
are missing, in terms of these directors?
FEIGE: It’s the characters and the franchise, and
the current atmosphere of appreciation for our films
with the moviegoing audience. In other
words, if we release an Iron Man movie, no matter what people would come to the
theater right now. That might be
different in a few years from now but right now, if you put out a movie called
Iron Man, if you put out a movie called “Marvel Blank” a certain amount of the
moviegoing public is going to come to see it.
That’s a huge safety net, which then means it’s not just about figuring
out “what do people want to go see?” People want to go see what we have right
now – thank goodness, and we never take that for granted because the winds
could change at any moment. Which is why
we say, “Okay, here’s this wonderful safety net. People want to come see our stuff, now we want
that stuff to be interesting. We want
them to be rewarded above and beyond just ‘oh, I want to see a suit flying
around or I want to see somebody pick up a building.’” How do we make it more interesting than
that? Not just for the audience, but for
us. I’ve been doing this for 13 years, I want it to be interesting every time,
I want it to be different every time.
And, as you’ve heard me say before, we have the best pre-vis artists,
the best concept artists, the best costume designers, the best production
designers, the best visual effects supervisors, the best visual effects vendors
in the world ready to work on our movie and do an amazing job and make them
look as good if not better than any of the other movies out there. So, when we bring in the filmmaker, it’s not
to give us all of those things because we have all of those things. When we bring the filmmaker, we bring
somebody to help us elevate the material with those things, to help us do
something different with all of those resources at their disposal. When you talk to Shane [Black], you hear him
talk a lot about that. He’s a guy who’s
used to sitting in his bedroom typing on a laptop with ideas that pop out of
his head. And then one time with Kiss
Kiss Bang Bang – which is spectacular – he was able to do that on a small
scale. We said, “Do that for our
movie. Do that for something this scale,
don’t worry about what you think it’ll cost or how you can pull it off, just
write it.” With his co-writer Drew
Pearce, they wrote some pretty spectacular sequences that we gave to the team
to figure out how to accomplish.
Can
we expect to have The Avengers 2 to have a subtitle or is it going to be called
The Avengers 2?
FEIGE: I would say that if you look at the trend of
our upcoming movie, Iron Man 3 is the only one that has a number. I like “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” instead of “Star Wars 2, Star Wars 3.”
With
the world-wide success of the first Avengers movie and how it’s one of the
biggest movies of all time, how has that impacted the way you’re developing the
sequel? You have to feel a little bit of
pressure to top or equal what you’ve already done.
FEIGE: Well Joss has said it on the record in the
past, it’s not about going bigger. It’s
not about,...
‘And
this time there will be five more explosions in this section!’ I mean certainly you want to up the ante, you
want to exceed people’s expectations, but I think there are various ways of
doing that and Iron Man 3 is a very, very good test for us of doing exactly
that. The first movie we make after The
Avengers has our hero spending more time out of the suit than any of the other
movies; that seems potentially counterintuitive to some people, but that was
exactly why we did it. We didn’t want to
say, ‘Oh now it has to be bigger and he fights 100 people in armored
suits.’ Yeah the action sequences are
big, there’s more action in Iron Man 3 than in the other two movies, but at the
same time it’s a much deeper and a more exploratory character journey on the
heels of our biggest spectacle with The Avengers.
Joss
is looking at just that and now we’ve been consistently talking about this
leading up to Avengers, what is most interesting to us – and that’s why we
hired Joss Whedon in the first place – is the interaction between the
characters. That’s more fun to us than
the massive action scenes that are going to have to come with it and we’re
going to have to figure out. They’re
going to have to be clever and raise the bar.
But already, the scenes that Joss has of just the characters sitting
around interacting are hilarious.
They’re awesome and moving and a notch or two above the first
movie. To me, that’s where you want to
top yourself.
I
completely agree, the scenes between Robert and Mark Ruffalo are the things
that I think most people are most looking forward to seeing in the sequel. Have you guys considered casting Dwayne
Johnson in a Marvel movie?
FEIGE:
I think yeah, I mean his name has come up in the past. I’m a gigantic fan of his, I think he’s an
incredible – I might have met him once a long time ago, but I haven’t really
met him. I don’t really know him – but I
think he’s an unbelievable personality and an unbelievable sort of force of
nature. He’s awesome in Pain & Gain,
he was great in G.I. Joe, he’s really kind of an amazing human being. His Twitter’s always cool and he promotes the
hell out of everything he does. I would
love him to be part of the Marvel universe somewhere, someday.
What
is the current status of a Doctor Strange movie?
FEIGE: Doctor Strange is something that I talk about
often and it’s sort of next up for us to dig into and explore. Our executive producer on Iron Man 3, having
just gone through having done Captain America: The First Avenger and as I
was finishing, he started working on the bones that would become Iron Man
3. Now that he’s finished Iron Man 3,
he’s working on the bones that will become Doctor Strange. Now that Iron Man 3 is finished, some of our
“spare time” is going to be debuted on trying to crack Strange.
So
that’s a real priority for you guys.
FEIGE: Yeah.
As we look past 2015, pastAvengers 2 and Ant-Man, I think Doctor Strange
should be one of the next movies in the years following that.
A
lot of women asked me this question, are there any plans for more women
superheroes such as Wasp, Captain Marvel, or any other characters from the
Marvel universe?
FEIGE: Yes, yes there are. And even if you look at Avengers, if you look
at Iron Man 3,Captain America: Winter Soldier that we have in production right
now, all have strong female characters – stronger than I think people even
would’ve guessed. It’s a priority for us
because we have an enormous amount of incredibly strong female characters in
comics.
Do
you see a woman superhero being the lead of a new franchise? Predominantly in the past, it’s been a hard
transition to get the primarily male superhero audience to come out for a
female superhero. Do you think that’s
something you guys will be able to crack or is it going to work over time?
FEIGE: I think over time, it’s going to work. I’ve said in the past that you should choose
a list of female action superhero movies that haven’t worked. I don’t believe they haven’t worked because
they had a female in the lead, I believe they didn’t work because they weren’t
good. They weren’t technically well done
movies.
Is
there anybody currently developing, writing a Falcon or War Machine spinoff
movie?
FEIGE: No.
Have
you guys cast who will be playing Thanos?
FEIGE: No.
Recently
you’ve talked about how certain characters, like Ghost Rider and Blade are back
in the Marvel fold. Is Electra back with
Marvel?
FEIGE: Electra is part of the Daredevil contract, I
believe. I believe, don’t quote me on
that, I’d have to check with legal and it would take a long time and I’d have
to get on the phone with business affairs, but I think she’s included under the
Daredevil rights agreement.
Do
you see a future where it’s possible that something could be worked out with
Fox or Sony where some of the characters that they’ve gotten can somehow be
brought back into the Marvel fold when you guys are making a movie? Whether it’ll be working together, or do you
see it’s never going to be together?
FEIGE: There’s certainly nothing in the horizon that
indicates that we’re going to be doing anything like that any time soon. But as I’ve said, I’ve been in Marvel for 13
years, and I’ve seen a lot. So, I would
never say never when it comes to what we could do to characters on the screen.
There’s
been a lot of talk about who is in Guardians of the Galaxy. Who is officially cast in the movie, can you
say?
FEIGE: I can’t because I sometimes forget what we’ve
announced and what we haven’t announced.
As we did with Winter Soldier a few weeks ago, we will most likely do a
start of production release in the next few months, once we start production,
that announces and lays out everything official.
When
and where do you shoot Guardians of the Galaxy?
FEIGE: We shoot it this summer in the United
Kingdom.
The
whole thing is being shot over in London and the surrounding areas?
FEIGE: That is correct. We’re shooting in the studio space where we
shot Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The First Avenger.
Disney
has D23 and you guys have always gone to Comic-Con, are you planning on doing
both or just one or the other?
FEIGE: The last time they had a D23, we did both
Comic-Con and D23. I expect we do
something similar for that. I mean,
certainly Comic-Con is our traditional home for these kind of things and
that’ll continue but we had a good time at the last D23. I suspect we will at this one as well.
If
you could give any advice to DC and their Justice League movie, what would you
tell them?
FEIGE: I don’t know.
I’m sure they have smart people over there who have a plan and know what
they’re doing. Man of Steel looks like it’s going to be awesome and obviously
Dark Knight is awesome. I don’t
know. It’s what I say all the time and
have said over the years, which is, have confidence in the characters, believe
in the source material, don’t be afraid to stay true to all of the elements of
the characters no matter how seemingly silly or crazy they are. I don’t know, I think the Marvel characters
have a bit of a leg up for all the reasons that Marvel fans are aware of in
terms of the emotional complexity of the characters and the flawed nature of
the characters. Those are obviously the
elements we want to accentuate amongst all the action.
I think
there have been a lot of great DC stories and there are a lot of great DC
characters, and if they focus on those things the audience will be
interested. It was a very unique model
that we were lucky enough to be able to do – introducing each individual hero
before introducing The Avengers. That,
to me, is what was always interesting about The Avengers. The Avengers are not The Guardians of the
Galaxy, are not The Dirty Dozen, where you spend a movie introducing each
character and putting them together for the first time. The Avengers was cool because they were
preexisting characters that teamed up for a big event. I think that’s why Justice League was cool,
Justice League was first. That’s what
they did first in comic form.”
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