Kevin Feige will go down in the history books as the man who revolutionized blockbuster cinema, taking the upstart Marvel Studios and turning it into the biggest game in town by adopting a filmmaking methodology that was as ambitious and unprecedented as it was groundbreaking.
Almost all of the competition have attempted to mount a shared universe of some description in the thirteen years since Iron Man, but none of them have come close to matching Feige’s MCU in terms of either critical or commercial quality and consistency.
It helps that the company’s chief creative officer is a lifelong fan of Marvel Comics, but his most emotionally overwhelming experience as the architect of the MCU was driven by cold, hard cash. As revealed in new book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe via TheDirect, the monstrous success of Avengers: Endgame‘s opening weekend left him feeling a little overawed.
“To exceed the expectations by such an enormous amount – I got a little emotionally overwhelmed in my house that morning. Just at how the world had responded to this thing that we’d worked so hard on for the past five years – not to mention the whole MCU for ten-plus years – but particularly Endgame.”
Endgame would go on to decimate box office records on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie in history, although James Cameron’s Avatar has since reclaimed the title after a lucrative re-release in China took it past Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and back to the summit. At the end of the day Feige is a businessman first and foremost, so it’s only fair that a massive financial return for the Infinity Saga’s conclusion would hit him square in the feels.
