Kevin Feige, CEO of Marvel Studios, addressed critics of superhero films in a recent interview. For the past 10, Feige and his MCU have amassed a large number of critics, including some of the greatest living filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Denis Villeneuve, who have all made their displeasure with the superhero genre and gone as far as to label it “not cinema.”
In an interview for the official Black Panther: Wakanda Forever podcast, Feige addressed the sceptics who dismiss the superhero genre out of hand because it is rooted in comic books, adding, “No, not for me.”
“There were some people, who couldn’t get past a four-color, printed, two-dimensional story. You know, they just couldn’t do that. Just like today, dare I say it. The people who can’t get past a genre story or something that’s in space, or people who can breathe underwater. ’No, not for me.’”
Nate Moore, the producer at Marvel Studios who joined Feige on the show, added that some people view these movies not as movies but as “a theme park.”
Read: Robert Downey Jr. Responds to Marvel Criticisms, ‘Let’s Just Get Over It’
Besides, Kevin Feige expressed his thoughts on superhero fatigue during an appearance on The Movie Business Podcast.
“I’ve been at Marvel Studios for 22 years now, over 22 years, 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 extended his analogy by saying that adapting books is similar to adapting movies and that their firm has “80 years of the most exciting, emotional, revolutionary stories that have been told in the Marvel comics” to work with.
“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.”
He continued by saying that “adapting these stories into various genres” is another important tactic for preventing content fatigue:
“But another way to do that is adapting them into different genres and what types of movies we want to make. And I, from sitting at USC, probably Semester 2 before your screenwriting class, Jason, and sitting in Cinema 101 and being exposed to so many different types of film that I said, ‘I want to make all of these. I don’t want to just make one kind of movie, I want to make all kinds of movies.’ And I found that if we tell the story right, and we adapt them in a way that the audience still, knock on wood so far, is falling us along 22-plus years later with, that we can tell any types of movies that share two things. The Marvel Studios logo above the title and a seed of an idea from our publishing history.”
