It’s widely agreed that the MCU needs to do something to give it a new lease of life after the franchise has found itself spluttering, both in terms of weakening critical notices and box office gross, in recent years. Disney seems to think going for a “quality over quantity” approach might work, but that wouldn’t exactly do the trick if the fewer Marvel project we get a year are at the level of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Instead, Kevin Feige apparently has a different tactic up his sleeve.
According to the latest rumor to come from insider Jeff Sneider, the Marvel Studios president intends to hire more experienced directors to helm the MCU’s movies with the aim of ensuring better results. “Feige does want to hire more established talent behind the camera,” Sneider claimed on The Hot Mic podcast.
On the one hand, this concept is intriguing fans, as some are getting themselves excited imagining all their favorite filmmakers hopping aboard the Marvel train. Others, meanwhile, aren’t exactly convinced it would do much good, as evidenced by recent controversial MCU entries helmed by popular directors.
If neither Taika Waititi and Chloe Zhao, both of whom have Oscars to their name, couldn’t deliver a universally beloved Marvel film, what hope does anyone else have?
And who’s to say more established filmmakers would actually want to join the Marvel machine?
Maybe the way to entice them inside would for Feige to hand over greater creative control.
Others are getting carried away with this rumor and have already mapped out their dream director/character pairings inside their heads. Guillermo Del Toro Man Thing movie, anyone?
For many fans, the reason why hiring more experienced directors isn’t appealing is because they believe it’s not who was behind the camera of Marvel’s recent projects that’s the problem, but who wrote the script. Writers like Doctor Strange 2‘s Michael Waldron and Quantumania‘s Jeff Loveness did not have a formal feature film credit to their names before working on these major blockbusters.
On the other hand, if Feige could pull off this coup, we would forgive everything.
Martin Scorsese making a Marvel movie? That would be cinema.
