Welcome to Produced by, in this episode, Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios, discusses his journey in creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He also delves into the struggles of making each film within its budget, creating a linked universe, and bringing about inclusion within Marvel Studios. This conference highlight was recorded in front of a live audience in 2018. If you would like to learn more, please visit www.producersgill.org.
Please enjoy Kevin Feige's insights in producing blockbuster movies. Alright, well welcome here on Saturday morning, and I'm really excited to be here today with Kevin Feige. Wow, this is exciting. I know you're a bunch of producers out there, so you love numbers, but his 19 films that he's produced have all opened at number one at the box office, and made $16 billion worldwide.
That's just this weekend. In fact, I think Infinity War was the highest to get to a billion on its 11th day of release and opened at $880 million worldwide. Black Panther will be the number one superhero movie domestically of all time, $1.3 billion. Yeah, and that's just this spring.
Iron Man, Thor, Guardians, Spider-Man, Captain America, X-Men. He's had his hand in all of these at one time or another, and so many others. Since 2000, when he had his first producing credit, actually, on X-Men. Thanks very much.
Well, how do you like that? Watch in your life for the last few years, roll by there. It's pretty cool. Roll by in the Pinewood Atlantic, but first.
That's right. We spend a lot of time down there in our home away from home. Yeah, you like Pinewood. It is a legendary name in this business.
It's a legendary name. We shot a few films at Shepherds and Pinewood in England. And as I said awkwardly in that piece, you fly to Atlanta, you drive through Atlanta, then you drive down to Highway 3, and you drive through a lot of woods. And you go, where are we going?
And then you see that Pinewood logo and a beautiful brand new facility. Amazing, amazing. Well, welcome here. Marvel Studios, incredible.
I'm going to take you through your career here to see how you got here, because we have a lot of producers out of the audience. I've wondered that. They would like to be you, Kevin. Yes.
And I want to just say right off the bat, if you go see one of these movies that he does, it's produced by Kevin Feige, and there's no other names. It's produced by Kevin Feige, and that is harkening back to the days when the producer was the producer, and there weren't 20 credits and different things like that. There are a lot of other names, a lot of other people with other titles that you know about. It's great.
First off, though, I want to say, how many people saw Infinity War, Avengers Infinity War? Okay. All right, so Kevin is going to tell us what the hell happened. That was the idea for going back four years or so.
We had this idea of having a movie in which they do not win. And I was supremely confident in it, and we spent a lot of time putting it together. In the final days before we released it, I started going, uh-oh. What if they did what?
Yeah. What if they were Bell? The best response is, I hated that, but I loved it. And seeing people have an emotional response to these, because I'll give you a secret.
These people aren't real. These are pretend characters. And seeing people have that emotional visceral reaction to it was the best. Incredible.
Different. And you know, it strikes me that that's one thing, the reason for the success here that you've had with Marvel is it does attempt to, I wouldn't use the word top itself, but go in different directions each way, not resting on the laurels here of what came before. Our 20th film, which in 10 years, which is incredible, and in some ways it seems like one long job to me, and in other ways it seems like it's just been a day. Since Iron Man 1, which by the way, we screened the near final version of Iron Man 1 in this very theater.
And it was the responses to that screening that made us start to be, you have to keep in mind I'm sure we'll get into it. Iron Man was an independent movie. It was our first film. I had been a part of a lot of other Marvel films in a lot of other studios, but we didn't have the creative control or the financial responsibility of those films.
With Iron Man 1, we did. And it was after the screening in this very theater, and the response to it that we started to think, oh, this is, this could work. And you say independent. Nobody thinks of that when they think of these big blockbuster movies that they were independently made, but that was independently financed made in every way out, just like an indie movie, right?
It was, we had a completion bond company. We had foreign pre-sales. I spent a lot of time meeting with exhibitors from various countries around the world, pitching them the project. It was the first and last time we ever had to do it like that.
But it was actually an amazing experience that I sort of took for granted because it was like, at the time, it was simply, this is what we have to do to make this movie. We had a certain amount of financing. We had to get another percentage of it from foreign pre-sales, and this is just what we had to do. It was actually great because it allows you to pitch the movie over and over again.
And you start to learn. You start to see when most people didn't know Iron Man. People knew Marvel. Marvel had X-Men success and Spider-Man success, but they didn't know Iron Man.
So I would pitch the story and you could see where they would start to glaze over, or they would look at their watch, and you could see where they'd go, oh, and lean forward. And then I'd go back into a room with our writer and with John Favron go, you know what we had to do more of this? Because they lean forward. It's not exaggerate.
That's interesting. And that was your first straight produced by credit of those in IT movies I mentioned that opened at number one. You've never known number two, Kevin. That's incredible.
I don't know if there's any other producer in the history of the business that's had that kind of a track record. I can't think of anybody in terms of opening at number one that many times. So do you ever feel pressured? Do you ever go home with tremendous anxiety?
Yes, you do. Is there any level of insecurity? It's nothing but insecurity and anxiety. When I first started working on movies, I was an assistant to a producer, and I felt very lucky to be there.
I felt lucky to be loud on the lot and just to sit there and get coffee. And then I started doing more, as an associate producer, as you mentioned, on the first X-Men. I was just excited to be in the room where decisions were being made. Maybe I'd pipe up once or twice.
And then a few years after that, when we got the responsibility to do Iron Man ourselves, I just wanted to get it in theaters. I thought, you know, movies just come out. They'd imagine missing a movie and I thought, oh my God, we could do that. We could be the first.
Oh, sorry. It's not ready. We didn't finish it. It didn't work.
So that was a lot of anxiety. But we carry that through us on every movie because truthfully, had Iron Man one not worked, we wouldn't have been able to make another movie. We were making two at the same time. We were making Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.
And if those hadn't worked, there wouldn't have been more. But we've always kept that type of thinking. And also because we intertwined these films. If Thor didn't work, if Captain America didn't work, then Avengers wouldn't have worked.
And if Avengers didn't work, then this whole notion of tying movies together wouldn't work. And onward and onward and onward. On each film. So crushing pressure, crushing expectations, paralyzing anxiety at all times.
But the fun outweighs it just a little bit more, which is why I keep doing it. Yeah, got to have fun. And let me take you back as you mentioned your beginnings in the business too. How did you start?
Did you always want to be in the movie business? You grew up in Boston or you were born in Boston. I was born in Boston. I grew up in New Jersey.
I loved movies. I go to the movies every Friday night. I would be a nerd and keep a list of every movie I saw. And what the sound system was in the theater that would save some ticket stubs from these out.
You keep your tickets like I do. I love that. I love that. And I still have all the tickets from when I saw The Phantom Menace 13 times in the theater.
Wow. There were psychological issues at the time. And I wanted to go to film school. I wanted to go to USC.
It was the only school I applied to. I was very lucky. I got in my freshman year. So when I was 18 years old, I moved out to LA.
And didn't end up getting into the film school for a few years after that. How many times were you rejected four or five times? So I applied every semester. Rejection.
Next semester. And the very last opportunity when I started thinking, well, what else would I do? I got in. Why do you think you finally got in?
I don't know. They needed a warm body, I guess. I'm not sure. They needed a quota to fill.
And while I was there, I saw that the smart kids were getting internships. And they were interning for companies I hadn't necessarily heard of or places. And I didn't want to do that. I was all forgiven by all and not making any money and paying for my own super shuttles.
I didn't have a car. So my internship was costing me 40 bucks a day to take a super shuttle there a couple times. This was before Uber, everybody. And the cabs didn't just wouldn't show up.
And I saw listening for an internship for Donorschuler Donors Productions. And I knew what they had done and Dick Donors had done. Goonies and Lethal Weapon. And of course Superman, which is one of the formative movies for me as a kid.
And I started there as an intern. And Superman, of course, came out of a comic book, DC comic books. So that leads to the question were you always a comic book nerd? Or was it the movie that attracted you?
I read some comics, I collected some comics briefly. And I knew all these characters. I watched the cartoons. I had the pajamas.
I had some of the toys. But it was really movies. And I sort of didn't quite understand why there weren't more movies based on those characters. Because the movies I loved in the 80s, the Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones movies, Ghostbusters, they all could have been.
Back to the future. They could have been based on comic. But they weren't. That's interesting.
So you went to work for the Donor Company. Richard Donor, obviously great director. And Lauren Schuler Donor, wonderful producer. Did you want to go in which direction did you want to go in when you went in there?
With Richard, with what he was doing are with her. Were you immediately attracted to the producing side of things? I think initially, certainly I was aware of Dick's credits that we discussed. And initially I would have thought, yes, I want to go and follow Dick's shoes.
When I started working there, I interned there for a year and a half. I was a receptionist there one summer. And then I was a paid PA there my last semester in school. And having spent so much time, I got to see sort of who did what and what was going on.
And it was actually Lauren who was working more, doing more interesting projects, involved in more things. And it was her staff and her assistants that kept moving up the ladder. And when I was an intern there, she had an assistant who was doing quite well and was about to get promoted up to work on a movie called Free Really 2. And he couldn't go there without replacing himself as assistant, which is how I then got hired as her assistant.
And his name was Scott Stuber and he now runs Film for Netflix. And previously, at New University. So Lauren has an amazing track record. Not a training round, would you recommend that to become a producer to start in that kind of level to see all aspects of everything?
Absolutely. And even now with the 10 years of Marvel Studios, we have promoted the executive producer of the, there is another producer on Ant-Man and the Wasp. Stephen Bruce Sardt, the executive producer who's working on Captain Marvel right now, Johnson Schwartz. These were my assistants 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago.
So we promote from within. And he'll be taking applications after the, so Lauren produced X-Men. And you had your first producing credit, I think, associate producer on that. Is that how you met, you know, Abi in terms of Marvel?
Is that how that relationship started? Absolutely. Yeah, I worked on the first X-Men film, which had it sort of geared up and then went down and ramped up again and then went down over the course of 3-4 years, had been in development, I don't know, 5 or 6 years before that. And finally, it started to come together.
And there I met Abi Rod. Abi Rod who at the time ran Marvel films would commute from New York to LA a few times a week. And really had this belief that these characters could do well, cinematically. And he was right.
And we worked together, he then, after we worked together on X-Men, he hired me at Marvel Studios, which at the time were about 3 offices, sharing space on Lil Santa Monica with a kite company that Marvel owned. There were not grand expectations for Marvel Studios from the comics division, because there hadn't been a lot of luck with features, particularly for Marvel, in the decades before that. There had been films that were the opposite of luck before that. That hadn't done anything for the brand, so they were very skeptical of it.
X-Men soon followed by Spider-Man, started to change that. Wow, and that's amazing. So did you suddenly have to throw yourself into all Marvel lore if you weren't totally versed on all that? I mean, the endless comic books and all those characters and everything?
How did you do that? I did. I knew a lot of it by sort of Osmosis, because I was in this genre world and this world of science fiction and fantasy. But I did start to delve very, very deep into X-Men as I wanted to be a part of it.
Lauren was very welcoming of people giving opinions. And I would start to write notes on the drafts when they came in and just put them on a desk. And she was very gracious, read them, thought they had some good things. Next thing, no, you're sitting in the room with the writers and with the filmmakers.
It just kind of keep your mouth shut at first, but then slowly offering opinions. So I read a lot of the comics then and read sort of all of them. And it was amazed that so many of the developmental questions that people had about characters, about structures sometimes, about the storylines, I kept saying, wait a minute, look, it's right here. Just look at this.
Like, well, how do we make these dimensional? We don't want this to be a cookie cutter, two dimensional cartoon heroes. We want them to have depth. What other attributes can we give to them?
And you look in, there's a whole index entry in the comic book that tells you everything you need to know about these characters. Because of course, in the comics, they're three dimensional. And they've had, I mean, some of them, even by that point, had been around 30 years. They have a lot of history and a lot of things to step into.
I do think there were people at the time running, being decision makers within studios, who prided themselves on not even opening a comic book. Pride themselves are not reading them, not looking at them, which I think was a mistake. Yeah, in terms of that, I read something about you that was really interesting. And it has to do with you have a hit film like that.
And then the sequel naturally comes along. And you had different ideas for sequels than maybe sequels that were made about how sequels could be successful. And you did them in your backyard or something. Is that true?
Well, no, I did them in my head primarily. But yes, I loved sequels. I loved franchise films. I never felt any cynicism towards them the way the press did when I was a kid.
And I think still do sequels, reboots. I would argue a lot of what we were doing in our movies is as original as anything happening in movies right now. But because they're sort of interconnected and based on source material, people don't look at that way. But when I was a kid, I would see Superman.
Love Superman. Love Superman II. Superman III. Not so great.
Superman IV. Horrible. Like, they're documenting you and go watch about what happened with Superman IV. Basically just slowly kelly off the franchise.
And then I walk out of that movie and go, I have to do Superman V. I have to save it. What do I have to think about it? You got to save Superman?
Yeah, I got to think about what would be a great Superman V. And I did the same things after Star Trek V didn't work. Oh, Star Trek 6, Star Trek 6 could be. Robocop II.
They kind of a lot of franchises that started well and went off the rails. So it was a weird mental exercise hobby that I had to think about. What would I do? Cut so many years later, you're in charge of putting sequels together, and you have to use, you know, you use all of your experiences.
What can you do differently? What can we do differently? And even when you get to a part 3, I did not coin this term, but somebody coined it term, 3 Quillitis. Because you can go through various, various film series and see where part 3 didn't work.
Not always true, Toy Story 3 was tremendous, but sometimes, you know, this is probably eight or nine years ago. People were talking about 3 Quillitis. So you make the note to self. If we're ever lucky enough to get to a part 3, we're not going to succumb to that.
And it really was about saying, once you get that far into a series, the audience is saying, we're with you, we like these characters. They're not saying, we want exactly more of the same. They're saying, we want to spend more time with these characters. That's what I wanted watching films growing up.
So we use an opportunity to say, we can go somewhere different. We can hire Shane Black to do a Christmas movie, Weird, Voice Over Narrated Iron Man film. We can make the third Captain America film, Civil War, and bring an Iron Man and rip the whole universe apart. We can hire Taika Witi for, and call it Ragnarok.
People say, what does Ragnarok mean? I go out at the end of days at the end of time, but it just kind of sounds cool. And have Taika take us to a whole new level? And Infinity War, Avengers Part 3, Jon Anthony Russo come and with Thanos, literally tear half the universe apart.
That's incredible. All those kinds of different ways. You can go and of course you really invented the whole idea of a universe. The MCU, the Marvel universe, was the comic.
But it was the comics. The comics had always been interconnected. In movies for sure. When we were starting out with Iron Man, people didn't look at it.
Even some people internally looked at it as rolling the dice as every movie is. Nobody looked at it. We had 8,000 characters who could all interconnect. People just looked at the fact that we didn't have Spider-Man, we didn't have X-Men, we didn't have Fantastic Four.
So one of the things I knew we could do, hopefully our instincts and our creative choices would lead to great movies and movies that were different from those others. But we had all those other characters. So we had the ability, which the other studios contractually did not, to intertwine the characters. Which is why we had Sim Jackson show up at the end of Iron Man 1 in an eye patch.
So you're part of a bigger universe, you just don't know yet. At the very incredible. Are you looking forward to marrying all of it together? Obviously we're all aware.
Well first of all, obviously Disney got Marvel. When you said you were here in this theater, Paramount was your partner. And then Disney did. And now Disney is trying to merge with 20th Century Fox, which has X-Men and Fantastic Four and all of those different things.
So is that the ultimate dream here to have the universe expand? Well, what ends up happening with that? I just sit waiting for calls saying, yay or nay, from people far above me. But yes, of course it would be nice for a company that owns a lot of intellectual property to have access to that entire library.
That would be wonderful. Do you have it in your head exactly what you do with that now? I still have that Superman 5 idea in there. It might be in there somewhere.
Yeah, because I'm trying to get into your head. Apparently that's where everything is. You know, with so many producers out here and everything, everybody worries about budgets and things. Even on the biggest movies, is there one person that taught you how to do budgets or what you did?
Or how do you approach that end of the producing business here? Well, I'm very bad with numbers. Math was not a big subject for me in school. If I look at a piece of paper that have some reason, you know, people love printing up sheets of paper with charts and graphs and numbers are so small.
You're like, I can't, I literally can't see this. But of course there were people. And it ultimately is, there's never enough money. Whether you're working on a student film at USC, you don't have enough money.
Whether you're working on something like Back to Back Avengers movies. There's never enough money, which sounds ridiculous, but is true. So what it comes down to is discipline and creative discipline and the notion that money, you can throw lots of money at something. It will not solve a creative problem often.
And there were times on Iron Man 1, on times on every movie we've made, but in particular, in example, we always cite on Iron Man 1. This is an example to answer your question. Ludias Bizzito, who is the co-president of Marvel executive producer in all of our movies, was our executive producer, on Iron Man 1, where we met him, is amazing at handling budgets and knowing where to allow something to go a little bigger, work with the department heads to pull things down. If you have a great crew of people which we're very lucky to have, they can all find solutions.
They can all find creative solutions around a budgetary issue. And oftentimes those solutions are better than what you were initially trying to do with the budget figure that was larger. On Iron Man 1, we had this idea that Tony Stark had to change his RT chest plate that he has in his heart. And in his lab, there were going to be these enormous mechanical arms.
And he was sort of controlling them. And they were huge and coming around him. And kind of the joke was that they would tell his scope down into tiny little, like most minute refined surgery with these big giant arms. So we thought it was so funny.
We had great artwork made up for it. We couldn't afford it. It was too, we wanted Iron Man to fly and be cool. We need to put the money there.
We didn't have time for this. What essentially was a sight gag of these big giant CG arms. So take him away. John Favreau was rehearsing with Gwyneth and Robert, and they come up with what you now see in the movie, which is he's just doing it himself, and she walks in.
And it becomes this very intimate, sort of disturbing but cool, fun, close contact that she's reaching into the cavity of his chest to get the wire and she thinks it's gross. And it becomes an amazing bonding character between two people instead of this big CG robot arm sight gag. So you find inventive ways of doing things here, even on, because we always think these movies cost so much money. But there is a ceiling at certain points here, obviously, in terms of ceiling keeps going up.
But yes, the truth of the matter is, you know, a lot of it is certainly on Avengers movies now is above the line. The actors have become giant stars. We talk a lot about saying that the hero, the character is the star, and we really believe that, which allowed us to do things like Cass, Robert, Denny, Jr., and Cass, Chris Hemsworth, and Cass, Mr. Evans, and Mr.
Pratt. Chris has done asked me why they're all named Chris. They're all named Chris. Don't ask me why.
Even back in Iron Man 2 with Scarlett. However, over the years and the movies are going to succeed, the actors deserve to get paid more. So the above the line is very, very big on these movies, as the actors deservely get the money that they should for multiple appearances in a movie. The below the line is still very large, but not.
I mean, not that different than most of other movies. So you still have to find the creative solutions around a budgetary problem. I wanted to ask you too about women in the Marvel movies, and what we saw with Wonder Woman went through the roof, and you have Captain Marvel with Brie Larson, right, and you have Black Widow you're going to be doing. And Black Panther, among the many things it was praised for, was the fact that there were so many women key figures there.
Is this something that was long in the planning, or is this something you were thinking about now and looking at the world and saying we have to be more representative here? It's a bit of both. I mean, a lot of it was long as most films are take years and years to get going. Captain Marvel, Black Panther both in the works for many, many years.
But certainly the experience of Black Panther, even before it came out and was a tremendous experience for us and a transformative experience for us, Ryan Coogler is a singular talent. He's an amazing human being, an amazing talented director. He's really, and he's a humble, really nice man. And I told him we were on the junket.
He said, before the movie opened, I said two things. We finished the final mix, final playback, where you watch the entire movie, completely finished for any final tweaks. And the movie ended. And I sort of just instinctually didn't even think about it.
I mean, over Ryan I said, I think that's the best movie we've ever made. And he goes, no, stop, stop, stop. And I didn't even quite realize what I'd said. That was just, it just came out.
And on the junket at some point I said, Ryan, you've made us a better studio. You've made us a better studio. Because the amazing talent that he brought in, we always, you can look at the history of the directors we've hired. Almost none of them had experience working on movies this size.
And that even predates Marvel Studios. That was me being around when they hired Brian Singer on X-Men or Sam Rameon Spider-Man. I mean, Tyka came from Hunt for the Willer People, right? We actually hired him before that movie came out.
It was a movie called Boy. It was even smaller than that that we loved that we hired him for. But I had seen that that worked. Find people who have a unique point of view, who have a unique vision, something to say, and surround them with very talented people who know how to do movies like this.
Ryan came on board, Ryan actually had in some ways, because of Creed, even more experience, sort of on slightly bigger movies than Tyka, for instance. And Ryan was very open. And he said, yes, if you guys have production designers, happy to meet with them. I'd also appreciate if you would meet with some of these people that I've worked with.
And you look at their resumes, and they've not done much, certainly in terms of big budget films. Here we go well. Of course we'll meet. Of course we'll meet.
But the whole idea is surround them with people who've done this before. And every single one of them came in with presentations that were by far the best presentations we've ever seen before. Hannah Beechler, production designer, and Black Panther blew us away with her ideas for Wakanda. Ruth Carter with the costumes, Rachel Morrison, a cinematographer.
All of those came to us through Ryan. And now we can't imagine, certainly not have meaning of that movie without them and all the future movies we hope to make with them. Were you, well you said you thought it may be the best movie. Were you quite prepared for its worldwide hit them?
I mean that acceptance of this movie on such a level, because it is an original movie here in the Marvel Universe. And I mean it just went through the roof in every way. It was on the cover of Time Magazine. It had people in Congress pointing it out.
It crossed the social stratosphere into the conversation and into the editorial pages, front pages. Black Panther. This is from a comic book. Yet it's gone into many different areas here.
I love even seeing the Wakanda forever salute that Chad Wicken Ryan just kind of came up with one day on the set and now you see athletes on them. It's amazing. I mean the truth is these movies cost a lot of money. We have big expectations for them.
And we always hope that they will do well enough that we can do another one. Certainly Black Panther surpassed all of our already very lofty expectations. Are you ever, I mean obviously you're going to be doing another Black Panther and do you want to tell us all about that right now? Yeah.
It was unusual though that opened in February and then in the end of April we had Avengers with, we're seeing more. It was like, you know, bonus footage in a weird way. It was great. And it also, what I was talking about earlier, once Iron Man had worked, we announced Iron Man 2 Thor, Captain America and Avengers.
And we didn't really have a backup plan. I mean that's one, that's sort of one bit of advice. On one regards, yes, have a backup plan. If you want a particular actor and you don't get that actor, you're still going to move forward.
At least we would still move forward. So you have to have other ideas to keep the train moving. But in the big picture, we just believe that this was going to be engaging. We just believe that there was going to be something about seeing these characters together on frame in the same frame that would be exciting.
And we just worked very, very hard to make sure that Thor was charismatic and engaging enough. And Captain America was interesting and had this deep gravitas that when they shared a scene with Robert Downey, who we knew everybody loves as Tony Stark at that point, that it would be additive and even more interesting. But if those movies didn't work, Avengers were still coming out and probably have to adjust the marketing campaign somehow. But we were all in.
Same thing with every move we've made. But in particular, Black Panther, big swing for us. We were still shooting Black Panther while we were shooting the Wakandan sequences in Infinity War. So we believed very much that people would respond not just to the character of Black Panther, but also to the supporting characters, who at the time nobody knew, and this world of Wakanda, which is why we have the character of Shuri and the character of the Koiye character of Unbaku.
All the characters that we believed would be the winners out of Panther show up, however briefly, in Infinity War. And it's just that belief of keep moving forward with your instincts. I was curious too, you know, was Spider-Man. I was a terrific reboot, whatever you want to use the term last year with Tom Holland and the new Spider-Man, the younger Spider-Man.
And he was introduced in another movie. But before that movie came out, there are risks. You don't think of risk when you think of Marvel because it's so successful. But you're taking risk all the time here.
And you introduced him before you introduced him in his own standalone. Talk about that deal that you made with Sony to finally get that into the Marvel Universe here. It was just a conversation between then head of Sony, Amy Pascal and I. And she was asking for ways that we could be more involved in their Spider-Man movies going forward.
And she had often been very gracious and asked us to read scripts for the spotty films that they were making without us. And I was very honest with her and said, I don't think that works. Just a set of notes or something. And then just sort of blirted out wanting to let us do it.
And as she tells the story, she threw a sandwich at me. And the meeting was over. She did not actually throw a sandwich, but the meeting was over. And then I got a call either later that there the next day saying, I can't stop thinking about this.
And it took about, I don't remember, six or seven months before it all came together. And that, you know, I'll go against something I said earlier. When we were developing Captain America, Civil War, we did have a plan with Spider-Man and a plan without Spider-Man. Because that movie was prepping and writing and gearing up to shoot while we were still negotiating with Sony to figure out if we were going to get Spidey.
Wow. So, and that was another case of this putting a director in, this movie, Spider-Man Homecoming, who had done a small movie which I loved. It was in my top 10 for the year called Cop Car. I think that's what, if you haven't seen Cop Car, you should see Cop Car.
That was his film. But great, great movie about two kids in sort of, out in the wilderness in Colorado, after school, it was sticks against fences and they come across an abandoned police car. And they start playing with the speaker and playing with the sirens and then start driving and then start playing with the gun. And it is tremendous movie and it's tremendous and it's funny and it's tense.
And for Spidey film that we wanted to go younger, that we wanted to get real performances out of younger kids, he seemed like a good choice which is why he was on the list initially. Yeah, just incredible. And he did such a good job, you know, with this movie too. It was really entertaining.
I love the comedy in all of these films. You managed to work in comedy, that was an intentional thing. Or, you know, how did you put this in so many films? Obviously Guardians of the Galaxy was a huge breakthrough in that regard.
I don't know that we ever sat down and said, we're going to make, you know, we're going to drive towards comedic moments in all of our movies. I think a lot of my favorite movies have comedic moments. I think the very best movies have comedic moments because I do think when you have an audience laughing with you, that is an instant connecting piece with the film. They're opening themselves up emotionally to the pretend images you're flickering in front of them.
And if you can get them to laugh, you have a better chance of getting them to have other emotions along the way. Certainly it was Favreau who started that tone and who was able to navigate quite well, the gravitas of a businessman being injured in Afghanistan and being held hostage with that same businessman attempting to use his new repulsor rockets and hit the wall. Literally, smashing to the wall, drop to the ground, have a fire extinguisher, put him out. So that worked was an interesting lesson for us as we started to get into more of it.
And there's a sense that we take our characters very, very seriously, but you also can have fun with the absurdity of certain scenarios. And there's a deft way to do that, which I think lets the audience in on the joke, but without breaking the reality of the world building that you're creating. Laura Ragnorock could have been in the comedy category at the Golden Globes, in my opinion. It's hilarious movie on its own level.
It is, and Chris Hemsworth is such a funny comedic actor and a deadpan. He's great. And seeing certainly people who've seen Infinity War, he continues in Avengers 4 in very unexpected and fun ways. He's fun.
He's not just this incredible Adonis, which he also is, but he's hilarious. And as we were working towards Thor 3, talking about how do we avoid sequelitis, how do we take it somewhere new, I was talking to Chris on a set of Age of Ultron. And he was in the full floor regalia between takes and he was asking about Thor 3, and I said we're going to have to think about it to do something very, very different. And there were two things that started.
One, he was very, very jealous of Captain America getting all of these other characters in the Winter Soldier, and then certainly in Civil War, when he got Iron Man and all of them together. And he'd go, mate, what about, mate, what about, who am I getting? And he was always sort of joking, not joking about it. So we would start thinking, and that is one of the ways that the Hulk became a part of that storyline.
But also, I said to him on set that day, I said when we first cast you, Chris, Thor was, blonde hair, a big red cape, a hammer. I'm embarrassed to say, blonde eyebrows, which we dyed, his eyebrows in Thor 1. It's ridiculous. Blonde beard.
I said now, Chris, Thor's you. So we could rip off the cape. We could shave off the hair. We could destroy the hammer.
And it's still, you're still four. And I was like, wait a minute, let's do all three of those things. And then we've led us towards Ragnarok. It just says, in that magic head of yours, it just all comes together one way or another.
It's funny. I talk about casting in general, Paul Rudd. He's a very interesting choice to front a major franchise like that, but he's also known for comedy as well, and can do. Serious act.
Yeah, he's a great actor. He's a great actor. And man always was supposed to have, he was supposed to be out of all of the characters, the every man. The every man, maybe not even particularly on slightly the wrong side of the law, and find himself in this scenario where he gets the suit.
And Paul was one of the only people we spoke to, I think. And it's amazing. And seeing his interaction with the other characters briefly in Civil War, he has done amazing work with Evangeline Lilly as the wasp, who really is our first co-tidal female hero in the MCU. Even a few months before, Captain Marvel comes out.
She's done a tremendous job. And the work that Paul Rudd does in the next Avengers movie. He's quite good. He's an amazing actor.
We've talked about success, and you make it sound so easy success because it's creative, and you have a lot of great ideas. What about failure? How do you deal with failure when something's just not working? Well, it's horrible, and it is discouraging.
But it also, as you always hear, is the opportunity to try to do things better. We've failed on every single film we've ever made. Every single film. We've just done it before it was released.
You've got to time your failure. We've had screenings of our movies that are awful. Oh, yeah. And going back to our earliest movies, where people go, well, it was fun while it lasted.
That didn't work. Well, the run had to end sometime. And it's our job to go and get in there and do whatever it takes. How has it changed for you since you've joined Disney?
Have you noticed a noticeable change in it? And tell us what that would be? I'm not sure we'd be here if we hadn't been bought by Disney. Certainly wouldn't be here with the same level of success.
Having a home, having a family that is 100% engaged in what you're doing versus a percent or 12% distribution deal does make a difference. It does make a difference. And when those people happen to be the smartest people, marketing movies, maybe in the history of movies, then you get pretty lucky. But it really is.
It's tremendous. And Avengers One was the first film that they fully marketed and distributed for us. And of course, you saw how that went. But having the leadership of Alan Bergman and Alan Hornet-Buyger supporting things like Captain Marvel, like Black Panther.
I talked before the budget for Black Panther was bigger than Dr. Strange, Ant-Man Civil War. So it was a big swing. And you can't do swings like that if you don't have the support and encouragement of the leaders of the company.
So it's been amazing. Even just driving over here, I got a text from Disneyland Paris, where they have just launched their Summer of Heroes campaign with Loki and Spider-Man and Captain America all coming out in front of all these French tourists about to enjoy it. I love that stuff. I love that we can have a broader reach around the world, not just with the films, but with the consumer products and with the theme parks.
Two things that I also don't view with any cynicism whatsoever. And I think a lot of people do. I love the toys based on movies. I love the consumer products based on movies.
That's how I continue to ingest the mythologies that I loved when I was a kid. Not to mention going to a theme park and interacting with the heroes and riding rides. That all is part of a bigger world building that I think is important and just fun. And we've been a dream even before Marvel Studios.
So when it first was broached with me that Disney was interested in buying us, I suddenly had my future flash before my eyes. And so far so far so pretty well. We're now going to move to our portion where you have a few minutes to ask questions. And we have Mike's in the audience that will come to you.
And here is one. And I'll take you right there. Yes, sir. I'm very fascinated by the Amman Wasp, where just before that we've had Avengers Infinity War, where it's 22, 25 different heroes all fighting together.
Now we're having a movie that's primarily focused on two heroes. It's a basically a buddy action comedy. And I'm fascinated by how I'm still excited by this movie, even though we've gone down on Caro Count by like 20 people. Was that something that's intended that this is kind of a breather, kind of a new different tone change when producing this and putting this on counter?
Yes, exactly right. We did the same thing. The original Batman came out a few months after the second Avengers film. The notion that all of these film can be and should be tonally different and even different subgenres onto themselves.
So coming off of this grand earth-shattering epic of Infinity War, it felt right to do a fun family buddy movie. And which is, and Amman Wasp is certainly connected to our universe, but it's just an incredibly fun emotional story about family. I have a missed Marvel question, but before I do have something to like at Dorky's height, my very first two Spider-Man comics were in Karachi, Pakistan, used from a shop and hall in the wall. So that totally screwed up my life.
Speaking of Miss Marvel, the first Muslim comic, I mean, what could you talk about a little bit more and why her? Because there's some other Muslims like Dust and Anne Muslim characters before her. First of all, Kudos on the deep cut knowledge. Very impressive.
Miss Marvel is a newer character in the comics. This interpretation of Miss Marvel, who is a young Muslim woman who takes on the moniker, is quite popular in the comics right now. And it's something that we were talking a lot about and thinking a lot about. Captain Marvel, by design of the story, has to come first because in the Miss Marvel comics, this young Muslim woman is inspired by Carol Danvers, by the Captain of the Marvel movie.
And by the Captain of the Marvel that Carol Danvers became, and is sort of as a fan girl for that, and then that spins out. So we wanted to get Captain Marvel out there first so that there could be a young Muslim fan girl that is inspired by it. Hopefully in real life, and certainly within that story. Hi Kevin, and thank you for taking the time to have this conversation.
I want to go back to your USC days. Now you're seeing a lot on social media and the internet about all these master classes for film makers and some even discouraging going to film school. Can you tell us how much do you credit your days at USC to your success? Well, for me it deserves, in certain ways, all of the credit because it was the carrot, it was the treasure at the end of the rainbow for a kid who wasn't particularly doing very well in junior high school in New Jersey to read about this place that all of that George Lucas and Ron Howard and Reppers and Meckas, all these filmmakers went to this one place.
I sort of couldn't believe it, and it became this goal for me. And if nothing else, it got me from New Jersey to Hollywood, to Los Angeles. And I think that the first few classes were always taught from a point of view of the actual film industry because everybody there had been in or out of the film industry at one point. And it was in the old George Lucas building where I found the internship listing for the Donner's Company.
So it very much is part of my story. I think the fun thing about film is there are any number of ways into it nowadays, but certainly going that angle for me was very good. And I think it probably helped me get that internship, seeing that I was a USC film student. My question is, as a producer, what is the biggest pain that you have to deal with?
So hopefully that will resonate with some of the people in this room. The biggest pain, it always varies. It always varies. Usually just reality is the biggest pain.
We spend a lot of time in our fantasy worlds from a comic into our final movies, and it's darn reality that you have to navigate through, whether it's the reality of budget or the reality of personalities. We've been quite lucky with both of those things. But navigating reality to get your fantasy through is probably the number one job of a producer. And when you encounter barriers to that, whether it's a barrier of the rain is coming or you didn't get the location that you wanted or you don't have enough money for this sequence or a visual effect that keeps coming back from the vendor and is not getting any better.
Or an actor that you wanted, it wasn't available or has dropped out. Those are the biggest pains. But they're also the biggest opportunities, as I was saying before, to find a better path to the fantasy that you want to create. Hi.
Thank you for acknowledging the great women who worked on Black Panther, Below the Line, and of course the amazing women of Wakanda. So the last 20 films you've done have had all men directors. Would you consider the next 20 films or women directors to balance that out? Well, Anna Bowden would take Umbridge with that.
I guess she's the beginning of the 21st film in your analogy. I will say that what is happening now is certainly not just within the studios, not just within our studio, but within the agencies. And I think even within young women who want to direct realizing, oh, I should be up there at that level. So suddenly the directors, you call an agency and say, I'm looking for a director for such and such a project, send me who you got.
It used to be all men. It used to be all men and a few women. Now what we get might be even more women than men. It's even more than 50-50 for the initial meetings.
And we've been on projects coming up where 90% female candidates for it. So I cannot promise you that all 20 movies will have female directors, but I can promise you that a heck of a lot of them will. It's time to look forward to Let's Thank Kevin Feid! Thank you.
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