“Making less.”
If there’s a cure for superhero fatigue for Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, particularly in the wake of the brand’s string of bombs including Eternals ($402M), Thunderbolts ($382M) and The Marvels ($206.1M), it’s that.
“Making two or three movies a year, some years it will be one, some years it will be three,” says Feige about the MCU‘s curated output in the near future during a Friday presser. “We’ll be down to a single live-action show a year.”
Also, for Feige, hope prevails in a rival studio’s Man of Steel recently crossing $407M worldwide and counting.
“Look at Superman, it’s clearly not superhero fatigue,” asserts the Marvel Studios producer and president who believes that comic book movies are poised for better days. In the wake of Thunderbolts* and Captain America: Brave New World tanking ($415M WW), the MCU is finally looking at their first $100M+ opener for 2025 in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Still Feige doesn’t have any regrets with regard to the overabundance of the MCU on Disney+ and in theaters. It’s the only franchise in the world that can boast a $31 billion gross. While the Bob Chapek-led era of Disney championed a multi-billion overspend on streaming content, the Bob Iger era has been vigilant about course-correcting that, realizing too much of a good thing can certainly damage the first vital window of any Disney movie, that being theatrical.
From the start of the MCU through 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the second-highest grossing movie of all time at $2.79 billion, the comic book studio has made 50 hours of content total. Post-Endgame through next weekend’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the MCU counts 102 hours made between films and series. The number increases to 127 hours when counting animated series.
“The experimentation and the evolution of, I’m proud of and wouldn’t change,” says Feige who counts WandaVision and Loki as major wins for the MCU on Disney+. “It’s the expansion that is certainly what devalued [the studio and its content].”
Still, it was worth the gamble given the bottomless well: “We always had more characters that people were asking us about than we could possibly make,” he adds.
Explains Feige, “Coming out of Avengers: Endgame, the plan was ‘What do you do with this success?’ So much of our storytelling had been built for that finale on Endgame that thinking about the future was purely about, ‘Well, what do we do with this success now? Do we do more of the same? I guess.’ We had sequels lined up.”
“If you take success and don’t experiment with it, and don’t risk with it, then it’s not worth it. That’s why Eternals was first up. Let’s take something that nobody knows, that has these giant celestial mythic characters and work with a filmmaker like Chloé [Zhao] who sat around pitching us the history of humanity.”
When it came to the grand MCU crisscross plan across Disney+ and theatrical falling apart, The Marvels served as the wake-up call. Potential moviegoers stayed away from the sequel to the $1.1 billion-grossing Captain Marvel. Marvel learned that moviegoers’ unfamiliarity with Disney+ series characters Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau prevented them from committing to The Marvels.
Post-morteming MCU’s two lackluster movies this year, Feige says Captain America: Brave New World didn’t work as it “was the first without Chris Evans.”
“Thunderbolts* was a very good movie, but nobody knew that title, and many of those characters were from shows. There was that residual effect of [audiences going], ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is?’”
Even though Thunderbolts* didn’t hit a nerve, there’s still plans for the antiheroes to appear in the next two Russo Brothers’ Avengers movies.
In building a better mousetrap at Marvel, Feige says the studio has scaled down their production costs greatly. They took notice of the VFX spectacle that Gareth Edwards made with The Creator, which was shot in Thailand, and met with that pic’s below-the-line heads to learn how they pulled off such efficiency. Also, Marvel was pushed to scrutinize their budgets more coming out of the pandemic, which required increased safety protocols.
“The movies made over the last two years have been upwards of a third cheaper than they were two years before that, i.e. Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America, Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four are all significantly cheaper than films from 2022 and 2023, and they would have been even cheaper if it wasn’t for the strikes,” he explains.
The studio boss also questioned whether artificial intelligence was the answer to keeping VFX dazzle up, and costs down.
“Is AI going to do that? I don’t know that,” says Feige.
Marvel has long held friends and family test screenings on the Burbank Disney lot. Given the MCU’s string of bombs, they looked under the hood to see whether their sausage-making process was still intact. So, Marvel began testing their movies through National Research Group-recruited screenings. At the end of the day, per Feige, both the Marvel and NRG screenings yielded similar results. The studio has long believed in family and friends-recruited screenings in order to keep the content of their pics secret. Feige remains a big believer in testing: “That’s how you know when jokes work, when you’re not high on your own supply.”
Fans love a great Coke vs. Pepsi war, and that also extends to Marvel vs. DC. Though MCU alum James Gunn is off revitalizing DC Studios, there’s no bad blood per Feige with his Guardians of the Galaxy hitmaker.
“I think James has had an influence on us, and we had one on him,” beams Feige about Gunn’s success with Superman. “We texted. I was telling him how much I loved the movie. And he said ‘Wouldn’t exist without you guys.’”
And at a time when theatrical is being taken hostage by streaming, it pays to be brothers-in-arms.
“I think studios see every other studio as competition,” says Feige. “Right now in our business, I root for every movie. I want every movie to succeed.”
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