Marvel Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige isn’t a director. He isn’t a writer, either. What he is is a master planner. Having been the mastermind behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Feige’s greatest achievement has been seamlessly connecting 23 movies culminating in the most successful film in history, Avengers: Endgame.
Most of those movies are really good, too. Some of them are even great. And while you would think continuous storytelling played out for more than a decade would be carefully told in a linear fashion, that wasn’t always the case according to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
In an extensive interview with Vanity Fair, Markus and McFeely peeled the curtain back in talking about the writing process on the giant franchise as well as life at Marvel. Among their insights was an interesting tidbit about how they came up with the endings for both Iron Man and Captain America long before writing the last two Avengers films.
“It’s such a leap faith, right?” McFeely said. “We’d only had one movie as a foursome under our belt (when hired for Infinity War and Endgame). We got the job, thought about it all throughout the shooting of Civil War. And then the last four months of 2015, we cracked both those [Avengers] movies. So Tony’s death and Cap’s dance were on three-by-five cards in September of 2015.”
What’s perhaps most impressive about their comments is that Captain America: Civil War was just their second MCU movie and first involving Iron Man. For Feige to have confidence in them to map out Tony Stark’s arc well in advance speaks to Marvel’s ability to collaborate and put story over ego or hierarchy.
It’s not that farfetched when you think about it, either. Making movies out of sequence is a common practice. And the same goes for the writing process. What’s more impressive is that they were able to stick with those endings for arguably the two most popular characters in the MCU and build stories with dozens of characters around those conclusions. Not to mention the release of multiple movies, including Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther.
No doubt, what Feige and the various filmmakers and writers were able to achieve in the last 11 years really is impressive. It also makes you wonder what they have in store for the future. The next five MCU pics already have release dates and it feels like one big chess board where Marvel is always three moves ahead of all of us.