When Kevin Feige first arrived at San Diego Comic-Con, he was just days away from officially working for Marvel. It was July 2000, with a start date in August, and the young producer drove to the convention with his friend Geoff Johns. There, he purchased a series of deals and prepared to dive full force into the world of superhero movies.
Now, almost 25 years later and with his films topping $30 billion in box office, Feige spoke with Marvel Comics EIC CB Cebulski on the eve of his latest Hall H panel about their love of pop culture, comic books, and The connection between Marvel and Marvel.
After talking about how watching movies in the 1980s made him fall in love with the art form, Feige turned to one of his other obsessions: collecting. “It’s a disease, a disease,” Fitch said. he talked about how much he loved Star Wars It was a toy when I was a kid. I dug a sarlacc pit in the backyard to play with. Later I started buying StarCraft Toys for playmates. “Let’s hear it for our playmates StarCraft Action figures,” he joked. “You can’t talk about this in Hall H.”
However, it was not until 1995 that Kenner brought back Star WarsFitch said he had a terrifying realization. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, this isn’t just my childhood, this is going to be my whole life.'”
The same goes for Marvel. Feige was already very familiar with the universe before working exclusively for Marvel. He was involved in the 2000 X-Men Early in his career and six years later, he’s returning to Comic-Con with the newly formed Marvel Studios. There, he gave fans a preview of upcoming movies like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and, of course, the potential of a shared universe.
“This is our secret weapon,” Fitch said. “At that time, Fox had X-Men, Amazing Fleurr and Daredevil. Sony has Spider-Man. Universal has Hulk Many of the “big” characters were taken away. So when we become our own studio…there’s this notion that we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. We know this is not the case. Additionally, we can do something that no other studio can do, which is interconnect. That’s going to be our secret sauce, and that’s really our goal, to emulate the Marvel Universe on the big screen for the first time on the comic page. The rest, as they say, is history.
The panel goes on to show instances where Feige and his fellow filmmakers pulled images directly from comic book panels – such as Captain America beating up Hitler, or a snapshot of Thanos, which is pretty funny. “That’s interesting, CB,” Fitch said. “I think it would be cool if Disney+ had a feature where you could click on a movie and see the frame that inspired it.”
While Marvel Studios now finally has some control over every character in the universe, Feige believes that if he could do that, it would be too much. “I still think the most obscure character is a character named Woodgod, and I think if we’ve actually done that, maybe we’ve gone too far,” he said.
Woodgod—an obscure 1970s comic book character who was a human/animal hybrid trying to create a society of creatures like himself—will almost certainly not appear in the brand-new comics announced by the group. This is the result of Marvel Studios’ influence on comics following the TVA and Miss Minutes families (including Sir Seconds and Doc Clock) (and often vice versa). Read more about it here.
Finally, at the end of the panel, Cebulski asked Fitch about his hat. Feige famously threw his hat into the ring in his next film, and from then on Deadpool and Wolverine Now that it’s out, what is he wearing now? “My son saw it and asked, ‘Is that a Walmart?'” Fitch said. “No, this is not Walmart. This is a thunderbolt hat. This is the bullet with the asterisk at the end of the logo.
A preview of what happens next. Check back Saturday night for another Kevin Feige Comic-Con panel, Marvel Studios in Hall H.
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