Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige chaired an intimate roundtable discussion about the future of the cinematic branch of the Marvel universe mere hours before giving fans a peek at the first footage from Avengers: Age of Ultron at San Diego Comic Con this past weekend.
The studio head told lucky journalists present that films have been plotted out for some years to come yet, with Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 just some of the titles been worked upon.
When asked if the recent release dates (announced for currently unnamed properties) were mainly sequels, Feige clarified:
“We’ve only really, really announced through “Ant-Man,” But if you look at 2014 and 2015 — now, let’s hope that “Guardians” succeeds when it opens next week — but I do like the notion of the existing franchise with “The Winter Soldier” that we had this year, doing unexpected things with it. Taking it to new unexpected places, and then, the second movie of the year being an entirely new franchise, entirely new storyline. Next year, we’re doing the same thing with “Age of Ultron” and with “Ant-Man.” And I see that that could continue where it fits.”
Feige also confirmed, that whilst there are no current plans to cameo the characters starring in the co-productions with Netflix currently in pre-production, he admitted that they exist in the same world, so it isn’t an impossibility that they may show up in the coming slew of films from Marvel Studios.
The head of Marvel Studios also confirmed how they choose which of Marvel’s huge roster of characters to move into the cinematic universe. On this, he said:
“I would say it’s a combination, but it ultimately comes down to, what do we think would be cinematic? What do we think would be the kind of movie we want to make? So with “Guardians,” we very much wanted to — you’ve heard me say this before — go to the other side of the cosmic universe. [There is] an amazing amount of outer space-based storylines in our comics, and we only sort of just scratched the surface of that in the other movies. And it felt like time, with “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and our tenth Marvel Studios MCU movie, to do that. That we’d earned the right to say, “Let’s bring a bunch of characters no one’s ever heard of.” If it was just about public consciousness, I’m not sure we would have done half the characters that we’ve done up to this point, and certainly not Guardians. But it’s about what we think the public would be interested in, because it’s what we sort of are interested in as we want to spend two or three years working on a project.”
Mr. Feige also confirmed that as the film juggernaut keeps rolling that the output will increase, with some years having three films hitting cinema screens per year from Marvel Studios, and this, he says, gives them opportunities to highlight new characters.
Marvel Studio’s Guardians of the Galaxy releases Friday 1 August in the US and UK.
The poster to Marvel’s Ant-Man was also released at SDCC
