What exactly is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s main goal?
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has been hard at work with other creatives to create some of the best comic book movie content ever since 2008’s Iron Man. Needless to say, they’ve been quite successful, given that the MCU has been running for nearly fifteen years.
Feige and company don’t let the critics of superhero fatigue get to them, believing that their strength lies in their ability to use any genre they want.
But how do they manage it? What exactly makes everything work?
According to Feige, one goal is more important than the others.
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Marvel Studios’ Vision
During an interview with The Movie Business Podcast, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige discussed some of the MCU’s behind-the-scenes processes, as well as the company’s most important goal.
According to the executive, they try to “do a post-mortem on every project,” even the most successful ones:
“We conduct a post-mortem on every project, or at least try to, if we aren’t too busy with the next one. And I remember when we first started doing it on ‘Iron Man 1,’ we were asked to do it for the first time. And while we now refer to them as “post-mortems,” at the time they were referred to as “what went wrong” meetings. For Iron Man, we were asked to hold a ‘what went wrong’ meeting. ‘What went wrong?’ I wondered. This film was such a smash hit that it launched an entire studio. Why do we need a meeting to discuss what went wrong?'”
It’s a great habit for them, according to Feige, and it also helps them focus on their main goal, “entertaining the audience [at every] turn:”
“That’s a terrible way to put it, and it was to that that I was reacting. But it’s also nice to sit down and say, ‘Here’s what we did, here’s how we could have done it better.’ That is something we do on every project. And, to summarise what lessons have been learned, entertain the audience [at every] turn. Our Co-President Louis D’esposito frequently quotes Frank Capra’s quote, which basically boils down to, entertain first.”
He went on to say that “you can have as many beautiful messages as you want,” but if “you are not entertaining first, it will fall on deaf ears:”
“You can have as many beautiful messages, beautiful life theories, and beautiful thematics as you want to put into the world, as we and our filmmakers do. However, if you do not first entertain, your message will be ignored. And I believe that has always been the case, and thankfully, when you make movies that you want to see, you will also be able to entertain yourself, which is something we strive for here at Marvel Studios.”
Marvel Studios has been a huge success.
It goes without saying that Marvel Studios has gone above and beyond to entertain audiences all over the world. Avengers: Endgame was a spectacle on a scale never seen before in cinema history.
Feige’s approach to post-mortem project evaluation is also a good one to adopt. In fact, it’s likely directly responsible for some of Marvel Studios‘ recent dramatic changes—Blade getting a fresh start, Armor Wars becoming a film, Echo being delayed, and more.
Not to mention that these changes came on the heels of Phase 4, which had been less than smooth for many. Despite this, and despite the disappointments that some of those projects may have caused fans, the world clearly hasn’t given up on the MCU just yet.
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the next film from Marvel Studios, will be released in theatres on February 17, and fans are already excited.
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