Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige
(Thor: Ragnarok) is our 17th produced Marvel Studios film. We have the teams. We know how to mount the productions. We want a unique voice to come in and steer that massive ship to fresh waters and unique places.
Given that he is the president of Marvel Studios, it’s hardly surprising that Kevin Feige is a tireless cheerleader of films based on comic books.
It takes only a few seconds into an interview with Feige, whose films have earned billions at the box office, to see that his boyish enthusiasm for movies based on his comic book heroes has not diminished in the 17 years since he began producing them.
But he seems less enthusiastic about lumping Marvel films into one big, overarching category. Yes, there are superhero films — tellingly, he pegs such DC adaptations as Wonder Woman and Superman as “excellent examples of a superhero genre” rather than his own movies — but that doesn’t begin to cover the complexities when it comes to cinematic adaptations of Marvel comic books.
“You wouldn’t say ‘a novel genre,’” says Feige, in an interview with Postmedia to promote Thor: Ragnarok.
“You’d go, ‘Well what novel is it? Unless they are comic book fans, I don’t think, historically, people realize that within those comics they were different genres and different tones. All we wanted to do was showcase that in the different films.”
While there is certainly a lot of cross-pollination these days when it comes to Marvel Universe characters invading each other’s worlds, Feige points to a number of recent or upcoming Marvel titles that show how far-flung in tone these movies can be.
This past summer’s SpiderMan: Homecoming, for instance, was a “John Hughes-inspired high school story.”
Black Panther, set for a February release, is a “geo-political story of a technologically advanced, isolationist culture coming into the world stage.” Avengers: Infinity War, due for release in spring 2018, is a “cosmic disaster story.”
And Thor: Ragnarok, which opens Friday, is a “giant, intergalactic road-trip film.”
It’s also pretty damn funny. Not only is it much funnier than the first two Thor movies, it may be funnier than any Marvel movie to date. Part of that, Feige says, was the discovery of untapped comedic potential in leading man Chris Hemsworth. But Thor’s secret weapon this time around may be New Zealand director Taika Waititi, who encouraged on-set improvisation, boosted the buddycomedy elements between Thor and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and hired a wonderfully non-supervillain-y Jeff Goldblum to play a 14-billion-year-old dictator named The Grandmaster.
Waititi is best known for his work on TV’s Flight of the Conchords and such indie films as the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows and coming-ofage adventure Hunt for the Wilderpeople. What he wasn’t known for, until now, was overseeing films with a $180-million budget. But Feige says taking an auteur approach to Marvel films is one way the company maintains unique tones with each project. It’s also a tradition that dates back nearly 20 years.
“That goes back to my early experience in my first few years at Marvel, watching 20th Century Fox hire Bryan Singer for X-Men after The Usual Suspects or Sony hiring Sam Raimi for Spider-Man after The Evil Dead and A Simple Plan,” Feige says. “We take those for granted now. Those are two of the biggest directors in Hollywood today. But at the time, they were just really good directors working on smaller projects. Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon, James Gunn, Joe and Anthony Russo — that is a model that we found works really well. Ragnarok is our 17th produced Marvel Studios film. We have the teams. We know how to mount the productions. We want a unique voice to come in and steer that massive ship to fresh waters and unique places.”
Those unique places seem to be getting more unique every year. Noah Hawley’s Legion, a mindbending TV series with loose ties to the X-Men film series, is an example of the strange places Marvel adaptations are going.
“If you are immersed in a comic and you’ve read the comics, they’re all different and they ’re all unique and some of them go to incredibly fun places like Legion or what we did in Doctor Strange or things we have coming up,” Feige says.
“Audiences are now willing to and excited to go on that experience. It’s not just about a bank being robbed and a character running into an alley to put on a costume.”