by The president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, revealed some of the studio’s secrets in a recent podcast session.
One of the most popular movie series in history is the MCU.
It not only has a sizable and active fan following, but also its projects and performers have won major accolades.
Whether you like the MCU or not, everyone can agree that it must be doing something well. In a recent interview, Feige discussed this from his point of view.
What Powers the MCU?
The President of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, discussed the MCU’s success in an interview with presenter Jason E. Squire of The Movie Business Podcast.
While “storylines and spoilers” are kept under wraps, he said that Marvel has “no secrets” and doesn’t employ any special “recipe” to guarantee the success of its projects:
Jaseon E. Squire: “What are the secrets to Marvel Studios?”
Kevin Feige: “The honest truth, which is not as exciting, but you get the inside scoop on this podcast and I’ll give it to you. There are no secrets. There’s secrets in terms of the storylines, and spoilers, and things like that, but if there was a formula, because people have been asking up for a very long time, ‘What’s the formula?’ and the truth is there isn’t any.”
We got access to all the brilliant people at the other studios within Walt Disney Live-Action, Pixar, and shortly after Lucasfilm, so we can have all these inside conversations with people. This was one of the many, many positive things that happened when we joined the Walt Disney company a number of years ago.
Through those discussions, Feige discovered that a project’s initial “terribleness” and subsequent “shaping, working, and reworking” are common experiences in the creative process.
“And again, this was probably a decade ago, but I found it to be really soothing when the Pixar staff members talked to us about how difficult each project is for them to complete and how, eventually, everything they’re working on is… awful. And is not that great. It need shaping, working, and reworking. And because that’s how it was for us—and still is for us at Marvel Studios—I felt a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders.”
As a result of this “weight removed,” Feige was able to see that no concept “comes out of [people’s] minds completely formed,” and that all creatives must put in labour to create any idea excellent enough to “end up standing the test of time”:
“Making any movie or project requires a huge lot of labour and effort, much less one that endures the test of time, which is always our goal at Marvel Studios. For some reason, I just assumed that everything created by other successful organisations and individuals must have come to them already formed, but at Marvel Studios, we had to toil, toil, toil, toil, toil, toil, to make everything work. No, that is not the case, it turned out.”
While Marvel does not specifically own any secrets to its own success, he came to the conclusion that there is one secret that is “common among great corporations, storytellers, and filmmakers:” and that is “a huge
Marvel Studios’ Real Success Formula
Retakes are common for MCU films; in fact, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania had retakes little over a month before its debut.
While that would suggest to some that there are issues with the movie, it is really evidence of the “tremendous amount of hard work” that Feige talked about going into each Marvel project. Retakes indicate that Marvel has identified an issue and is attempting to rectify it.
Fans should be able to experience the fruits of the labour put into each project as the MCU keeps releasing more and more movies, series, and extra features.
