Say what you will about Marvel, but the company has figured out the perfect mix of ingredients for blockbuster success. Their superheroes movies aren’t revolutionizing cinema, but are engineered to give their growing legion of fans exactly what they want. For some, this had led to criticisms that Marvel movies suffer from a uniformity of visual and storytelling aesthetics, but for Kevin Feige, he’s understandably just fine with things as they are are.
Chatting with Uproxx, Marvel’s creative guru reflected on why some people might think the studio’s movies are interchangeable, and says the fact they’re all connected may be emphasizing the similarities between pictures.
“I think it’s just the way we make the movies. I think all the movies are relatively different. I think there’s a narrative that people like to write about because they’re all produced by the same team and they all inhabit the same fictional cinematic universe. That we look for common similarities,” Feige explained. “And I’m not saying there aren’t common similarities throughout it, but I think ‘Thor: Ragnarok‘ and ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming‘ are two totally different types of movies. They’re both fun. People both enjoy them. Is that a similarity? If so, I’ll take it. If that’s a criticism, I’ll take that, too. But really, yeah, ‘Homecoming,’ ‘Ragnarok,’ ‘[Black] Panther,’ into ‘[Avengers:] Infinity War,’ ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp‘ after that. And a ’90s-set ‘Captain Marvel‘ after that; these are six very different movies. If what they have in common is they’re all really enjoyable and fun to watch, then I’ll take it.”
Feige has no real incentive to throw a winning playbook out the window. With global audiences smitten with the movies, Marvel is going to keep sticking with their winning formula, and who can blame them?
“Thor: Ragnarok” — which actually is a bit different than the usual Marvel fare — opens on November 3rd.