Kevin Feige will go down as one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history. His tenure as President of Marvel Studios has seen a record-breaking string of hits, the highest-grossing film of all time in Avengers: Endgame, and a total franchise gross of nearly $25 billion.
Much of this can be chalked up to his genuine passion for the characters. Feige first turned heads while working on 2000’s X-Men and gradually formulated plans for what would become the MCU using the few heroes the company still had the rights to. He’s still heavily involved in planning the storylines to this day, as proven by a new interview released by Sony Pictures in which he discusses the thinking behind Spider-Man: No Way Home.
He opened by revealing that the beginning of the creative process is his favorite part:
“Sitting in a room, in this case it was a conference room at Marvel Studios, with the team is always my favorite part of the process, where anything is possible.”
Feige went to specifically talk about No Way Home:
“We knew coming out of Far From Home that we didn’t want to shy away from the fact that his identity is now revealed, it’s out there, and that was certainly always the starting point, and with Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna and our director Jon Watts and Amy Pascal we sat and just started brainstorming, what happens next? What happens to him as he starts to- as he swings away form Madison Square Garden where that big TV screen outed his identity? And how does his life change and get turned upside down? And more importantly how does it affect his friends?
He also revealed that bringing back Alfred Molina was a long-held ambition:
Peter Parker can handle a lot, but when he starts to see his friends being affected by his actions unfairly that really is emotionally draining for him. So that was always early on where it was, and we had a lot of fun discussions, it’s always, having a discussion of ‘You know what would be cool? It would be cool if we did this, it would be cool if we did that.’ As I said I’d always been saying if we ever brought Ock back you’d have to bring Alfred Molina in, and how would you do that? We thought it might be fun someday.
While some can quibble over Marvel Studios movies feeling a bit homogenous, nobody can deny that Kevin Feige has succeeded where so many others have failed. Practically every studio attempted their own cinematic universe in the wake of The Avengers‘s success in 2012. Most of them failed, with notable exceptions being Warner Bros’ DCEU and Legendary’s MonsterVerse.
Even so, nothing comes close to Marvel’s dominance of the big screen over the last thirteen years, with Feige’s influence now extending to the small screen via Disney Plus. Here’s hoping he stays in place for as long as possible and keeps providing the secret sauce that makes the MCU such a winner.