Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was joined by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler and Deadpool & Wolverine helmer Shawn Levy yesterday for the dedication of the “Kevin Feige Division of Film & Television Production” at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Feige’s endowment has been hailed as “transformational,” and as The Hollywood Reporter explains, it will provide a lasting source of funding for faculty and students.
As the driving force behind the MCU, Feige is no stranger to fan feedback. However, he’s aware that paying too much attention to online discourse isn’t necessarily wise. Addressing that, the executive explained that “it can be wielded with such force now that you have to be beware.”
Admitting that paying too much attention “will crush you,” Feige added, “There are hours and hours of theories on YouTube, hours and hours on TikTok, hours on subreddits. You can read everything on everything and get a different point of view on it. You can go crazy. So, we don’t do that.”
For Marvel Studios, the best way to gauge how fans feel is with feedback from test screenings. Likening it to how film students show their work to peers for feedback, Feige pointed out, “It happens when you’ve already spent almost $200 million on a movie, and you screen it for people, and they’re like, ‘What was that?'”
“I thought we were the only morons that couldn’t do it perfectly the first time and had to really work at it to make it great. And turned out that Pixar would do the same thing.”
With Boseman on hand, talk eventually turned to the death of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman in 2020 following the actor’s battle with cancer.
Reflecting on his final meeting with the T’Challa actor, he said that Boseman expressed a desire to bring the same fun vibe he’d discovered with the Star-Lord T’Challa Variant in What If…? to the movie that eventually became Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
“We will be back in there, that was always my expectation,” Feige said, admitting it’s become easy to take those he works with for granted. “So the need to set a dinner or a lunch to say hi, I just never do. Because we’re busy and because we’re going to have a next time.”
“And that hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized that there wasn’t going to be a next time.”
The Marvel Studios President has a busy few years ahead of him. As well as getting Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars across the finishing line, he needs to figure out the next Saga, which many believe will revolve around the MCU’s rebooted X-Men.