With Marvel Phase 5 set to begin with the February premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the MCU is now entering its 15th year of dominating theaters. After nearly 30 films — and more in the pipeline — surely, audiences will have to grow tired of comic book movies at some point, right? Not if you ask Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige! In fact, he has no idea what you’re talking about.
“From probably my second year at Marvel, people were asking, ‘Well, how long is this going to last? Is this fad of comic book movies going to end?’” Feige told The Movie Business Podcast. “I didn’t really understand the question.”
As Feige goes on to explain, Marvel Comics have been around for 80 years, and in that time, it produced an endless array of narratives that stretch across numerous genres, all of them ripe for adaption. To him, asking if people will get tired of superhero stories just doesn’t make any sense if you understand the nature of film. Via Variety:
“It was akin to saying after ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ‘Well, how many more movies can be made off of novels? Do you think the audience will sour on movies being adapted from books?’ You would never ask that because there’s an inherent understanding among most people that a book can be anything. A novel can have any type of story whatsoever. So it all depends on what story you’re translating. Non-comic readers don’t understand that it’s the same thing in comics.”
So, as far as Kevin Feige is concerned, Marvel movies aren’t going anywhere.
“I found that if we tell the story right, and we adapt them in a way that the audience still — knock on wood so far — is following us along 22-plus years later… we can [make] any types of movies that share two things,” Feige said. The Marvel Studios logo above the title and a seed of an idea from our publishing history.”
(Via Variety)
