Marvel won’t be doing a big Hall H spectacular at San Diego Comic-Con this year, but Kevin Feige has still gotten his say. The Marvel Studios chief held a group interview last Friday to talk about Marvel’s past and future—and, presumably, to inject more Marvel into a cultural conversation that’s presently very excited about the success of its rival, DC Studios, and James Gunn’s new Superman.
But when you dig into what Feige told his group of assembled writers, what’s most notable might be how little he actually said. He repeated the Disney company line about how they’d been making “too much” content, using this to explain everything from why Blade keeps getting delayed to why Wonder Man (due out later this year) and Ironheart (out last month) weren’t released for so long after each series was completed. “I don’t like when things sit on shelves,” said the man who is in charge of Marvel Studios.
Blade, he said, is still happening; the current version is set in the present day. The movie doesn’t currently have a director.
The sheer amount of stuff still on the Marvel docket is apparently when you start trying to whittle down the many reports on the Feige interview (Variety, for example, ran at least three different pieces using bits of the conversation). He confirmed that, after 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, the X-Men will be recast for an X-Men film directed by Thunderbolts’ Jake Schreier.
Secret Wars, overall, “sets us up for the future,” Feige said, going on to suggest that no role is safe from potential recasting. Not even Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. He compared the possible recasting of those roles to the James Bond franchise and to Superman, which is interesting given that the Bond films don’t hew tightly to any sort of continuity, and every new Superman is a reset.
“Reset” is exactly the word Feige used about Secret Wars, saying it will be a “reset” for the MCU. He also used the phrase “singular timeline,” saying they are “thinking along those lines,” which should be a relief for anyone tired of too many timelines and universes in which anything can happen and, thus, very little of what happens has much emotional weight.
Speaking of lack of emotional resonance, Feige also said that the events at the end of Thunderbolts, which affected the entire borough of Manhattan, will not affect the upcoming season of Daredevil: Born Again, which also takes place in New York. Which, for me, raises some questions about exactly when each of these stories takes place in the Marvel timeline. Questions I am not going to even try to answer at this time.
There are a few disappointing bits in Feige’s statements. For one, despite all the setup, Feige said only that “potentially” there might be a Young Avengers project at some point. Also, Miles Morales will not show up in the MCU until the Sony trilogy finishes with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse: “We’ve been told to stay away,” Feige said.
Feige addressed the situation with Kang actor Jonathan Majors, with whom the studio “parted ways” after Majors was convicted on two misdemeanor charges (assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree, as NPR detailed). According to Feige, Marvel had already turned against Kang prior to 2023: “We had started to realize that Kang wasn’t big enough, wasn’t Thanos, and that there was only one character that could be that because he was that in the comics for decades and decades.” He said he spoke to Robert Downey Jr. about what he calls the “audacious” idea to cast the actor as Doom “even before Ant-Man 3 came out.”
Interestingly, right before Ant-Man 3 came out, Feige told Entertainment Weekly, “For years, we’ve always had the inkling that Kang would be an amazing follow-up to Thanos. He’s got that equal stature in the comics, but he’s a completely different villain. Mainly, that’s because he’s multiple villains. He’s so unique from Thanos, which we really liked.”
Feige teased one more thing about the future of Marvel, beyond recasting potentially everyone and resetting countless timelines into one singular story: “We were talking about a structure of an upcoming post-Secret Wars movie that I won’t name,” Variety quotes him as saying. “But I will say, like Shang-Chi, [it’s] getting back to what genre haven’t we done and want to do and how could this movie be that genre? [We would] focus on a singular storyline by embracing a certain genre we haven’t seen in a while.” Are you waiting with bated breath yet?
