Kevin Feige on Future, Robert Downey Jr., Miles Morales, Less TV

Though it hasn’t been quite seven years since he last did this, it’s still rare that Feige gives an interview of this length and candor. But after some ice-breaking small talk, in which Marvel’s chief creative officer shared his thoughts on DC Studios’ “Superman” (more on that in a bit), Feige made clear why he’s spending the Friday before the premiere of “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” — the 37th film and 54th title overall in the MCU — speaking on the record.

“We produced 50 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019,” Feige said. But in the six years since “Avengers: Endgame” concluded the Infinity Saga, “we’ve had well over 100 hours of stories — in half the time. That’s too much.” In fact, including animation, Marvel’s Multiverse Saga spans 127 hours of content.

After “Endgame,” Feige said the company entered into a period of “experimentation” and “evolution” of the kinds of movies it was making, leading to projects like “Eternals” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” “I’ve always thought if you take success and don’t experiment with it and don’t risk with it, then it’s not worth it,” he said. “What we also ended up focusing on because of Disney+ was expansion — and it’s that expansion that I think led people to say, ‘It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?’”

Consequently, Feige believes the well-documented problems Marvel’s been facing over the last few years stem from an overabundance of supply, not a sudden drop in demand. “Look at ‘Superman,’” he said of the hit film, which opened to $125 million domestically and has grossed $407 million globally to date. “It’s clearly not superhero fatigue, right?”

(“I liked it a lot,” Feige added of the DC film. “I love you just jump right into it. You don’t know who Mister Terrific is? Tough, you’ll figure it out. This is a fully fleshed out world.”)

As Feige explained — and as Disney CEO Robert Iger has also said more than once — Marvel’s dramatic increase in volume spread Marvel far too thin for its relatively small team of executives to keep up.

“For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” Feige said. “We spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga saying that’s never going to happen to us. We always had more characters than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month. Suddenly, there’s a mandate to make more. And we go, ‘Well, we do have more.’”

Starting in 2023, audiences began to sour on Marvel’s content on the big and small screen. As Variety reported in June, only three of the 22 films in the Infinity Saga grossed less than $500 million worldwide. Since the pandemic, however, seven out of 13 movies in the MCU have failed to reach that milestone. Viewership for Marvel’s streaming shows, meanwhile, has also steadily declined, according to data from Luminate. Most recently, “Thunderbolts*,” which earned some of the best reviews Marvel’s received in years, has only grossed $380 million globally.

“‘Thunderbolts*’ I thought was a very, very good movie,” Feige said. “But nobody knew that title and many of those characters were from a [TV] show. Some [audiences] were still feeling that notion of, ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is.’ If you actually saw the movie, that wouldn’t be the case, and we make the movie so that’s not the case. But I think we still have to make sure the audience understands that.”

To that end, Feige spent an hour discussing everything from budgets, TV schedules and when Marvel greenlights a project to when (or if) audiences could see Miles Morales, Ms. Marvel or Charlize Theron again. He also provided an update on the status of “Blade” with Mahershala Ali, and confirmed widespread fan speculation that 2027’s “Avengers: Secret Wars” will not only conclude the Multiverse Saga, but provide a “reset” for the entire MCU — including a new cast for the “X-Men” films.

There will be a lot less TV

While Marvel’s feature output is slowing down to at most three films a year (a pace the MCU first reached in 2017), its TV output is cooling off even further, with often just a single live-action show per year. And the shows they do make will have far less overlap with the feature films, to disabuse audiences from the expectation that they have to watch everything to follow what’s happening in any MCU project.

By way of example, Feige cited the Marvel TV shows of the 2010s — like “Daredevil” and “Jessica Jones” on Netflix and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Agent Carter” on ABC — which were produced by a separate, now-defunct division of Marvel Entertainment, so they had a tenuous connection to the MCU (if at all).

“I think allowing a TV show to be a TV show is what we’re returning to,” he said. Asked if the events at the end of “Thunderbolts*” — when most of the population of Manhattan was enveloped in an inky black shroud of depressive nothingness — would affect Season 2 of the NYC-based Disney+ series “Daredevil: Born Again,” Feige had a simple answer: “No.”

At the same time, the line between film and TV is not iron-clad. Jon Bernthal will play his “Daredevil: Born Again” character the Punisher in both an upcoming TV special and opposite Tom Holland in 2026’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

“Where we have great actors playing great characters, I think it would be fun to see them multiple places,” Feige said. “But the output will be much less.”

That reduction also meant that two of Marvel’s TV projects were held for over a year after they’d been completed: “Ironheart” with Dominque Thorne, which concluded in early July, and “Wonder Man” with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, which premieres in December. It’s something Feige is not keen to repeat.

“I don’t like when things sit on shelves,” he said. “It stinks.” The delay especially affected “Wonder Man,” which follows an aspiring actor (Abdul-Mateen) with hidden superpowers as he strives to land role on a TV series playing a superhero. Feige, who was wearing a “Wonder Man” baseball cap, pointed out that Marvel made the show before HBO Max’s 2024 comic book movie send-up “The Franchise,” or Apple TV+’s 2025 Hollywood satire “The Studio.” But now it looks like they’re following a trend, instead of leading it.

Diversity still matters, but don’t expect to see Miles Morales

Since the massive success of 2018’s “Black Panther,” Marvel has made a concerted effort to produce projects centered around women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters. Those titles include “Captain Marvel,” “Black Widow,” “Shang-Chi,” “Eternals,” “The Marvels,” and “Captain America: Brave New World” in film and “WandaVision,” “Ms. Marvel,” “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” “Secret Invasion,” “Echo” and “Agatha All Along” on TV. Several of these projects have been successful, but many have not, commercially or critically. More to the point, with Marvel’s decision to dramatically reduce its output, it’s been unclear what kind of future many of these characters even have in the MCU, if any at all.

Pressed on this question, Feige appeared unconcerned. “Marvel represents the world outside your window,” he said. “I’ve always said it, before DEI and woke became a thing and after DEI and woke became a thing — are we after? I don’t think so.” He singled out “Ms. Marvel” and “The Marvels” star Iman Vellani as “one of the greatest bits of casting we’ve ever done,” adding, “I can’t wait to see her somewhere.”

Where that will be is much less evident. At the end of “The Marvels” Vellani’s Kamala Khan appeared to recruit Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop to be a part of a young superhero team, but Feige danced around a question about whether “Young Avengers” — as a film, TV series or TV special — is on the horizon.

“Potentially,” he said. “In that case, it comes down to where’s the best story and where is the best strange alchemy. Who would be fun to see them with? Each other, because that’s what the Young Avengers are, but also mixing it up more.”

Feige was more definitive about the potential of another highly anticipated Marvel character — Spider-Man’s Miles Morales — showing up in the MCU in the near future. “That is nowhere,” he said. Until Sony Pictures (which holds the film rights to the character) completes its animated Miles trilogy with 2027’s “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” Feige explained, “We’ve been told to stay away.”

The Marvel Method is here to stay — it just won’t be quite as expensive

DC Studios’ co-chief James Gunn has said repeatedly that he will only greenlight projects that have a complete script. That is a pointed difference from Marvel Studios, which has sometimes announced projects, with release dates, before a writer has been hired, let alone before a script is completed, and famously reworks movies throughout the filmmaking process. “The Fantastic Four” star Ebon Moss-Bachrach recently told Variety that he didn’t think “the script was fully ready” when the cast began three weeks of rehearsal before filming, “so we were sort of workshopping the movie in a way.”

But Feige took issue with both the comparison between Gunn’s mandate at DC and Marvel’s approach, and the idea that Marvel needed to radically alter how it makes its projects. “We’ve never started a movie without a full script and I have never been satisfied with a script that we’ve had,” he said. “I’ve never been satisfied with a movie we’ve released.”

He defended Marvel’s practice of “plussing” projects “at every turn” as they’re being made — a term of art, referring to pushing for incremental improvements, that Feige credited to Walt Disney. “Actors, both the ones that are playing these characters for the first or second time and the characters playing them for the 10th or 12th time, are the best in the world at it and know these characters so well,” Feige said. “If they have an idea, you want to listen to it and you want to adjust to it and you want to improve it. I wouldn’t want to change that.”

Feige continued, “I know there are filmmakers — James in my experience isn’t one of them; maybe he is now — who say, ‘If you want to be a part of my movie, you just say the words and you stay here the entire schedule in case we need you.’ We have so many actors, we can’t do that. We don’t do that. We give people a window, we keep to that window.”

Marvel has changed course on at least one major aspect of its films: their cost. After budgets began to balloon following “Endgame” — partly due to the pandemic, partly due to “feeling the need to deliver a certain level of spectacle” — the studio “started grinding down the budget” in 2023. Feige said Marvel’s films from “Deadpool & Wolverine” through “The Fantastic Four” “have been upwards of a third cheaper than they were two years before that.”

Feige said Marvel executives even met with the teams behind the 2023 sci-fi epic “The Creator,” which director Gareth Edwards made for a staggeringly low $80 million, to learn how they pulled it off.

“I think everybody’s in that state of mind, at least at Disney,” Feige said of the belt-tightening. “I think it has to get better. Is AI going to do that? I don’t know.”

The MCU’s future won’t be in Hollywood

Don’t look for The Avengers to set up shop in Los Angeles any time soon. The super team’s next two adventures, “Doomsday” and “Secret Wars,” are being produced in London’s Pinewood Studios, the latest in a long line of big-budget Hollywood films to decamp for the U.K. The move has left many in the industry raising the alarm about runaway production – a message that President Trump briefly embraced when he floated the idea of imposing tariffs on foreign-made blockbusters.

Feige said that the decision to make the new movies overseas as opposed to in Georgia, where many previous Marvel films have been shot, came down to space, not just the U.K.’s generous subsidies.

“There was a time, which is not right now, but there was a time where we made that deal…five or six years ago where everybody was fighting for stage space in the great expansion of not just us but everybody,” Feige said, referencing the explosion in production that accompanied the streaming revolution. “So we had the opportunity to lock up Pinewood, which is why many of our movies will be there for the foreseeable future.”

He predicted that future Marvel films will be shot in the U.S., particularly in production hubs like Georgia and New York that offer more competitive film incentives than California, which recently passed a new $750 million production tax credit.

“My career of making these big movies, very few of them post the Phase One movies have been here and they moved because of the cost,” Feige said. There is one exception, however. “Wonder Man,” which takes place in Hollywood, was filmed in the entertainment capital.

Kang is kaput, of course, but what about Charlize Theron and the Eternals?

In March 2023, a month after Jonathan Majors played the archvillain Kang the Conqueror in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the actor was arrested for assault and harassment of his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari. Kang had been touted as the Thanos of the Multiverse Saga, and was set to headline his own film in “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” which would set up “Secret Wars.” But the day Majors was convicted on two misdemeanor counts of harassment and assault, Marvel announced it was parting ways with the actor; the following July, the studio revealed that Robert Downey Jr. was returning to the MCU to play the even archer archvillain Doctor Doom in what had been rechristened “Avengers: Doomsday.”

But on Friday, Feige revealed that the studio had grown wary of Kang’s heft as a character before “Quantumania” hit theaters.

“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. “We started talking about Doctor Doom even before we officially pivoted from Kang. In fact, I had started talking with Robert about this audacious idea before ‘Ant-Man 3’ even came out.”

While Kang’s future (or lack of one) in the MCU is obvious, Feige was far more circumspect about whether audiences can expect to see other A-list MCU cameos — like Charlize Theron’s Clea, Brett Goldstein’s Hercules, Harry Styles’ Starfox and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Mephisto — again in later projects.

“Do you want to see them again?” Feige asked playfully.

When a reporter responded that the inclusion of those characters indicates a promise that they would return at some point, Feige brought up the return of Tim Blake Nelson’s character Samuel Sterns from 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk” for 2025’s “Captain America: Brave New World,” and Rolf Saxon’s character William Donloe from 1996 “Mission: Impossible” for 2025’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.”

“That is fun to me,” he said. “So let’s talk again in 12 years and see who comes back.”

What about major characters like Moon Knight or the Eternals — would they return?

“I don’t know that it’s any of the specific ones you just named, but yes, that is part of the plan: Characters we’ve introduced post-‘Endgame’ will pop up again in some of the upcoming movies and beyond,” Feige said. “The fun of the comics is anyone popping up anywhere.”

Perhaps the most tantalizing moment in the interview came when a reporter asked Feige about how often Marvel plans to make films that focus on a single character like “Shang-Chi” rather than a giant team-up film. “We were talking about a structure of an upcoming post-‘Secret Wars’ movie that I won’t name,” he says. “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.” Let the internet speculation commence!

What Feige is watching — and what his future looks like

Clad in a “Fantastic Four” hoodie and seated next to a giant, $80 Galactus popcorn bucket, Feige took time to herald the return of Marvel’s First Family to the MCU, part of Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. “They deserve to be A-listers,” he said. “There’ve been maybe good ‘Fantastic Four’ movies or not so good ‘Fantastic Four’ movies, but nothing that felt like we had really seen what they are capable of.” (Feige also teased that the four lead actors from the unreleased 1994 “Fantastic Four” film executive produced by Roger Corman all have cameos in the new movie.)

He was especially excited about the retro-future aesthetic of “The Fantastic Four,” and how the film embodies the company’s efforts to make projects that aren’t intimidating to casual Marvel fans. “We always were planning, even before that became a talking point, to introduce them in their own world in which they are the only heroes,” Feige said. “It is a no-homework-required movie. It literally is not connected to anything we’ve made before.”

One possible hint for where the MCU could go next also lies in Hollywood’s past. Asked what he’s been watching recently, Feige said he’s started watching classic films every night, mostly from the 1930s and ’40s like the noir thriller “The Big Clock” with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton, the legal drama “Lawyer Man” with William Powell, and the Western “Dodge City” with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. “[It’s] remembering what cinema is and what movie going is and what entertaining audiences is,” he said. “Everything old is new again, by the way. That’s another reason I watch those old movies.”

As for his own future at Marvel, Feige appears to be keeping his options open. “Succession is a hot topic at the Disney company,” he says, alluding to Iger’s ever-impending departure as Disney’s CEO. “We always talk about succession, even within divisions, too, I think for that reason. Do I want to be making big movies for big audiences in 10 or 15 years from now? Yes, absolutely. That’s all I want to do. Marvel’s a great way to do that for me right now, but I hope to make big movies for lots of people forever.”