Kevin Feige Reveals a Big Change Marvel Is Making to Address Superhero Fatigue & Recent MCU Slump
Kevin Feige is discussing superhero fatigue and the box office slump that the MCU is experiencing.
The Marvel head got candid about recent box office fizzles for the MCU, including Eternals ($402M), Thunderbolts ($382M), and The Marvels ($206.1M), and how the company plans to address the slump.
Keep reading to find out more…
“Making less,” he revealed, via Deadline.
“Making two or three movies a year, some years it will be one, some years it will be three. We’ll be down to a single live-action show a year,” he went on to explain.
He also pointed out that superhero fatigue isn’t hitting across rival company, DC.
“Look at Superman, it’s clearly not superhero fatigue,” he said.
“The experimentation and the evolution of, I’m proud of and wouldn’t change,” he said of increased output over the years, referencing WandaVision and Loki as major wins for the MCU on Disney+, adding, “It’s the expansion that is certainly what devalued.”
“We always had more characters that people were asking us about than we could possibly make,” he added.
“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,” he went on to say.
He admitted 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?’” he went on to say.
They will still appear in the next two Avengers movies.
He also said the studio has scaled down their production costs greatly.
“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 said.
“Is A.I. going to do that? I don’t know that,” he went on to speculate.
Kevin also discussed the ongoing perceived rivalry between Marvel and DC Comics.
“I think James [Gunn] has had an influence on us, and we had one on him…we texted. I was telling him how much I loved [Superman]. And he said ‘Wouldn’t exist without you guys.’”
“I think studios see every other studio as competition,” he went on, “Right now in our business, I root for every movie. I want every movie to succeed.”