What Kevin Feige Doesn't Understand

The genres may change, but the superhero tropes remain the same.

January 29, 2023

All things must pass. I’m sure if you were in Hollywood making westerns in the 40s and 50s or musicals in the 60s, you would hope that the gravy train would never stop. There was so much money to be made! In the case of westerns, you could turn out countless stories for a relatively low amount of investment and flood the marketplace at a time when TV was only starting to arise as a real competitor. When TV did make its mark, Hollywood pivoted to more lavish productions like you’d get with musicals until that train ran out of steam around the same time that New Hollywood came to play in the 70s. But all things must pass.

Kevin Feige is the head of Marvel Studios and one of the most important people at Disney. His words can change the company’s stock price, which is why he tends to choose his words carefully and always with a positive spin. In a recent interview on The Movie Business Podcast [via Variety] Feige said he didn’t understand why people thought that the superhero fad would ever come to an end:

“I’ve been at Marvel Studios for over 22 years, and most of us here at Marvel Studios have been around a decade or longer together,” Feige said on “The Movie Business Podcast,” hosted by Jason E. Squire, an author and professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “From probably my second year at Marvel, people were asking, ‘Well, how long is this going to last? Is this fad of comic book movies going to end?'”

Feige continued, “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?’ You would never ask that because there’s 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. Non-comic readers don’t understand that it’s the same thing in comics.”

“There’s 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 have and adapt them,” he said. “Another way to do that is adapting them into different genres, and what types of movies we want to make.”

Feige concluded, “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 following us along 22-plus years later… we can [make] 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.”

Feige has been singing this tune for years. His basic argument is that because his superhero stories can jump between different genres, there’s no reason the stories should ever feel like they’re becoming stale.

Perhaps in private, Feige believes differently, but as I noted, his public comments carry a lot of weight with Wall Street, so we only have these comments to go on. With that in mind, I wanted to break down the various fallacies of assuming that the MCU can continue for decades simply because Marvel Comics has been around for 80 years.

Comic Books and Superheroes

To begin, let’s be sure to parse Feige correctly. When he says “comic books” he only means “superhero books.” That’s an easy mistake to make for the lay person. Superhero stories dominate the genre to where if you say, “I read comic books,” the uninitiated listener will assume you meant stories about people with superpowers fighting each other. The term “graphic novel” tends to get employed so people can talk about comic art without invoking superheroes (e.g. Art Spiegelman's Maus is a “graphic novel” not a “comic book.”)

It’s helpful for Feige to conflate the two, but he’s only telling one kind of story (we’ll return to that in a bit). There have been other comic book movies that aren’t based on superhero stories like American Splendor and Ghost World, but you will never see those movies from the likes of Marvel Studios because Marvel is only about superheroes. The reason people think Marvel Studios is limited is because they are. Feige keeps wanting to convince people that the box is bigger than it is; that all stories are available to them just as all stories are available to a novelist. But that’s just not true, and this transparently false argument is getting old.

Superhero stories—particularly the ones Feige is telling at Marvel Studios—have to abide by a certain set of rules (he’s not making deconstructions like Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns). The hero can be flawed but must be morally good. The antagonist can be misguided, but their plan must be clearly objectionable. The stakes of this conflict are innocent lives with the fate of at least a major city on the line (there’s also the implication that if the villain is not stopped then the world or possibly the universe will fall into ruin). The only way to resolve this conflict is through violence where the hero fells the villain (or the villain helpfully fells him or herself by accident). The villain is defeated and the hero learns a valuable lesson.

Within these confines, some directors at Marvel has managed to still tell interesting stories. In Black Panther, Ryan Coogler provides a captivating narrative about what it means to exercise Black power in a world that casually discards Black lives. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, James Gunn tells a story about found family and how maturity means that your family can still love you even if you’ve been a bit much to deal with. But other Marvel stories hinge on the hero learning to be less arrogant and learn the value of self-sacrifice if they’re about anything at all.

Feige, as he does in this interview, also likes to use genre as an explanation for why Marvel movies won’t get worn out. A favorite Marvel canard is that these movies can be anything, like how Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a “political thriller” or how Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has some PG-13 horror in its bones. Channeling these genres may help create a new color of paint to throw on the superhero tropes, but they can’t fundamentally change what a Marvel movie is. No one would mistake The Winter Soldier for Three Days of the Condor simply because they both have Robert Redford, and no one would mistake Multiverse of Madness for Drag Me to Hell simply because they were both directed by Sam Raimi.

You Can Run Out of Marvel Stories

I would agree that the superhero genre is slightly broader than what we’ve seen in Marvel movies, but not by much. While a western allows you to go in all different directions—Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are all John Ford westerns starring John Wayne, but no one would confuse the plots of the three—superhero stories can either follow or subvert the tropes, but the tropes remain the same. Either the heroes save the world or the heroes represent fascist strongmen who don’t answer to the people they claim to serve.

Marvel will never go deconstructionist with their heroes, which means the plot beats remain the same—good defeats evil. Their may be hiccups along the way (I wouldn’t be surprised if the villain, Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors) in the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania kills Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) as a way to create stakes, but there’s no question the Avengers will eventually beat Kang at the culmination of Phase Six), but the structure remains the same because it has to. Too much is riding on that structure to change it.

When Feige points to the comics as a way to show variety in stories, he misses that it costs just as much to draw superheroes talking as it does to show them fighting Galactus. Marvel movies don’t have that luxury. They have to be all-out spectacles, and all-out spectacles have to be crowdpleasers. Avengers: Infinity War may have a “downer” ending, but it wasn’t the end. It was the halfway point in a story that was promised to continue the following year. You can’t spend what Marvel does and bum out the audience because then they won’t come back for repeat viewings, buy the merchandise, and ask for more.

This kind of storytelling isn’t sustainable because it’s ultimately the same story. You can already see the drop-off in interest across Phase 4. The movies are still doing okay at the box office and I don’t know how the Disney+ shows are performing (because those numbers are secret), but from personal experience, I didn’t see much excitement around Thor: Love and Thunder or What If…? Sure, it was more content, but the ask for viewers has (unsurprisingly) followed the same pitfall as Marvel Comics: If you want to keep up with the story, you have to do it across a bunch of different things. So now it’s not a matter of buying a ticket to one movie every few months. It’s getting a Disney+ subscription and watching six episodes of a TV show so that you’re “prepared” for the movies…even if the movies then discard what the TV show did (see the poor characterization of Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) in Multiverse of Madness after the thoughtful work of WandaVision).

Perhaps Feige knows all this and he can’t say it because it would hurt Disney’s stock price. Perhaps he knows that the best he can hope for is more lighting in a bottle where the right cast, right director, and right story get together for a good movie. So he’s putting a cheerful face on a dour future where the MCU has had its moment in the sun and fans want to see what else is cooking. I don’t think this means superhero movies are finished (half of 2022’s top 10 at the box office were superhero movies), but I think audiences can get fatigued with anything and superhero movies aren’t immune from that simply because Marvel Comics has had a devoted readership for 80 years.

But fans have been devoted enough to the MCU that Feige should at least give them a bit of straight talk. The CEO of McDonalds doesn’t say that because they make burgers, their business will thrive because there all sorts of food in the world. That’s true, but McDonalds makes a few things. They’re not the best things in the world, but they’re good in a pinch and they’ve had success with the limited thing they do. Marvel Studios makes superhero movies. That’s fine. But no one knows how long the audience’s appetite for those movies will last.