Kevin Feige Just Confirmed What We Wanted All Along
Hold onto your hats, true believers.
Just in case you were entertaining the notion that the end of Marvel Studios' Infinity Saga meant the end of massive team-up films like the world-busting Avengers: Endgame, the King Geek himself — Marvel boss Kevin Feige — has helpfully chimed in to set you straight.
Speaking with Brazilian pop culture website Omelete during last week's Comic-Con Experience (CCXP) in São Paulo, Feige went out of his way to assure fans that just because Avengers 5 or the equivalent hasn't yet been announced doesn't mean it isn't cooking.
"Yeah, I mean, the MCU is all interconnected, but we really focus on one movie at a time," Feige said for the benefit of those three or four Comic-Con participants unfamiliar with the biggest film franchise in history. "We're going to make the best Black Widow movie we can possibly make, the best Eternals movie we can make, the best Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange, Thor, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, right? And keep evolving their stories. And then, yes, it's always fun to see them come together in a master plan. Which is, I promise you, well underway." (via Inquisitr)
Well, while it's not terribly surprising to hear that there will be further giant team-ups in which a phalanx of the MCU's greatest heroes come together to face some terrible threat (and make all of the money), we didn't exactly expect to hear Feige describe such a project as "well underway." Are we shocked, though? No, dear reader, we are not. Marvel has a long and proven track record of keeping tight lids on whatever they don't want to become public, from plot details of forthcoming movies to, you know, entire forthcoming movies.
The Marvel faithful were completely blindsided, for example, by the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year that a new movie centered on that half-human, half-vampire hunter of bloodsuckers Blade (starring the incredible Mahershala Ali, no less) was on tap for the MCU's Phase 5. With the 1998 Wesley Snipes-starring original being pretty much the first modern film based on a Marvel property, the reboot is a pretty big deal — and even the most intrepid pop culture hounds (like us, for instance) didn't even catch a whiff of it until Feige wanted us to.
So, the Geek Supreme has deigned to enlighten us; there is another Mighty Marvel team-up in the works, one which will probably feature a quite a few (if not all) of the characters he mentioned. Surprised? Yes, sort of! Shocked? Not even a little.
What will the next MCU team-up look like?
As to exactly what type of team-up film we'll be getting, well, Feige didn't say — he's got to keep a few juicy details under that baseball cap. We can always speculate, however, and if you're not new to Looper, then you probably know that that's exactly what we're about to do.
First, and most obvious: Marvel could simply be cooking up Avengers 5, which would almost certainly have some provocative title like Avengers: Wrath of Dr. Doom and focus on a new team coming together to face an ultra-powerful villain, such as... um... well, we're not sure, let us get back to you on that. As previously mentioned, said team could include any or all of the characters that Feige mentioned along with any others still on the table, such as (let us check our notes) War Machine, Ant-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Blade, Spider-Man (depending upon whether Sony Pictures and Disney continue to play nice), and all of those getting ready to field their own Disney+ limited series. This includes Falcon/Captain America, the Winter Soldier, Scarlet Witch, Vision (assuming that Wanda will actually bring him back from the dead), Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Moon Knight.
Marvel could also be planning on folding the characters recently acquired from Fox Studios into the equation; heck, rumors have persisted ever since Disney acquired those assets that Avengers vs. X-Men must certainly be in the works. Such a project could preclude the need for an all-powerful villain, as different teams of heroes might end up facing off in a Civil War-style conflict.
While either of these approaches could work, it's also safe to say that Marvel has never been particularly interested in simply repeating what has worked in the past. It could very well be that future team-ups will be slightly smaller in scale, featuring teams of select heroes that are forced into working together more or less by circumstance. This would allow for villains that are slightly less hardcore, and we wouldn't have to be looking at the potential end of the world and/or universe in every team-up movie. That kind of hook — particularly after Avengers: Endgame — will start to seem pretty tiresome the more often it's repeated.
Along these lines, we could be getting a team-up or two of the more fanservice-y variety. Always wanted to see the iconic comic duo of Spider-Man and Daredevil together onscreen? It could happen, and heck, throw Moon Knight in there for good measure. What about that all-female team of Avengers that was teased in the massive final Endgame fight? Hey, why not — just such a team, A-Force, has graced the pages of Marvel comics, led by none other than She-Hulk, who will soon be smashing her way onto your TV screen. How about Captain Marvel and young protege Kamala Khan, AKA Ms. Marvel, teaming up to put an end to the nefarious plot of an offshoot band of Skrulls? Sign us up!
Now that Marvel has pretty much all of its toys in one sandbox, the possibilities are near-limitless. Just don't expect to hear tons of juicy details about what Marvel has in store anytime terribly soon — unless Mark Ruffalo and/or Tom Holland are involved. We love ya, guys, but everyone knows you couldn't keep your mouths shut if your lives depended on it.