The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s head honcho Kevin Feige has thoughts on superhero movie fatigue.
Under Kevin Feige’s astute leadership, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown to become the biggest box-office juggernaut in movie history. Over 30 films in the long-running series have amassed over $25bn at the global box office, without even taking into account the colossal ancillary profits that stem from such a commercially-appealing endeavour.
Still, even the mighty Marvel machine isn’t completely bulletproof and 2022 was the year the studio found itself in line for some stinging criticism with films like Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Thor: Love And Thunder struggling to win over audiences and leading to prophecies of doom for the MCU’s future, positing the idea that audiences are simply tired of superheroes.
Kevin Feige doesn’t seem too concerned though, and has popped up on The Movie Business Podcast to denounce ‘superhero fatigue’, although the analogy he’s used to make his point seems a little odd to us.
“I’ve been at Marvel Studios for 22 years now, over 22 years”, he said, “and most of us here at Marvel Studios have been around a decade or longer together. And from probably my 2nd year at Marvel people were asking ‘well, how long is this going to last? Is this fad of comic book movies going to end? And I didn’t really understand the question. Because to me it was akin to saying after Gone With The Wind ‘well how many more movies can be made off of novels? Do you think the audience will sour on movies being adapted from books?'”
Feige would go on to answer his own question, adding “well, you would never ask that because there is an inherent understanding among most people that a book can be anything. A novel can have any type of story whatsoever, so it all depends on what story you’re translating. None comic readers don’t understand it’s the same thing in comics. There’re 80 years of the most interesting, emotional, groundbreaking stories that have been told in the Marvel comics and it is our great privilege to be able to take what we and adapt them.”
Perhaps it’s just us but it seems a bit disingenuous to compare superhero movies to book adaptations. To a large degree, the former are restricted by the conventions of their genre whilst a book adaptation can be almost anything as it can be drawn from an almost limitless number of genres and sub-genres. Besides, Marvel’s success is built on creating their films using a fairly standard formula. If there is a studio out there making superhero films that experiment meaningfully with notions of genre, it’s Warner Bros or even Amazon.
2023 will be a key year for Marvel Studios, starting with the release of Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania in mid-February. What are your thoughts on Feige’s remarks? Let us know in the comments below.
