By this point, we all know what Marvel Studios is, and what they’ve done. They resurrected Robert Downey Jr.’s career, they turned superhero movies into the most cohesive shared universe yet, and they somehow made Thor interesting. We can now thank President Kevin Feige for his creative guidance, but this golden age we’re in almost didn’t happen, and we almost didn’t have Feige’s guidance for the latter half of the build-up to Endgame. Why? Because of good, old fashioned corporate in-fighting.
Bob Iger, the current CEO of the Walt Disney Company, recently released a memoir titled The Ride of a Lifetime. In it, he reveals that both he and Feige had major disagreements with an unnamed New York-based Marvel Entertainment executive in 2015, along with past resistance from Ike Perlmutter, then-head of Marvel Entertainment. The spat was so volatile, in fact, that Feige threatened to leave his post at Marvel Studios.
Iger, knowing he needed to keep Feige on board, decided to split the film aspect of Marvel away from the bigger Marvel Entertainment enterprise. Thus, Feige was made the big kahuna within Marvel Studios and he started reporting directly to Alan Horn, current Disney chairman. Ike Perlmutter has since left Marvel entirely, never to be seen again, and Iger had this to say of the whole ordeal in his memoir:
“Kevin is one of the most talented film executives in the business, but my sense was that the strained relationship with New York was threatening his continued success. I knew I had to intervene, and so in May 2015, I made the decision to split Marvel’s movie-making unit off from the rest of Marvel and bring it under Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Studios. Kevin would now report directly to Alan, and would benefit from his experience, and the tensions that had built up between him and the New York office would be alleviated.”
It seems like this was all for the best in the end. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were previously held up due to Perlmutter and co.’s hesitance at inclusion, and Marvel’s now expanding at a rapid pace and has become the most successful film collective in history. I’m sure that even without Kevin Feige behind the wheel, Marvel Studios would’ve done gangbusters, but maybe it would have been less fun and more sloppy, like those DC flicks. Oops!
Marvel‘s still going strong, too, with a whole slate of new and exciting films coming out over the next few years, and with tons more arriving after that as well, the future has never looked brighter.
