Marvel Studios is starting to see a shift, and Kevin Feige recently teased that films like Ant-Man and The Wasp and Captain Marvel are only the start.
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Marvel Studios Chief Kevin Feige is focused on Captain Marvel at the moment, but during a recent conversation he teased what’s coming down the pike, and that includes more announcements of female-led superhero films.
“With [Ant-Man and The Wasp] and now with Captain Marvel and many movies to be announced in the near future, I’m anxious for the time where it’s not a novelty that there is a female-led superhero movie, but it is a norm,” Feige told EW. “And it is less a story of, ‘Oh, look, a female hero,’ and it’s more a story of, ‘Oh, what’s this about? Who’s this character? I’m excited to see that.’ And I think we can get there.”
So far Ant-Man and The Wasp is the only one to release (as Evangeline Lilly co-headlined), and Captain Marvel will hit next year. Black Widow is also getting her own solo film from Cate Shortland, but that film has been requested for some time, as have female-led Marvel films in general, and Feige addressed the delay in that process.
“I think there are a lot of reasons,” Feige said, “not the least of which was fighting for many years the erroneous notion that audiences did not want to see a female-led hero [film] because of a slew of films 15 years ago that didn’t work. And my belief was always that they didn’t work not because they were female-led stories โ they didn’t work because they were not particularly good movies.”
Films like Wonder Woman only help disprove that notion even further, and Feige is happy for any help in that regard, regardless of which studio creates it.
“I’ve always said, I root for all genre movies because the success of those movies helps us,” Feige said. “Because not everybody knows the difference between what studio makes what movie or what comic book company what character comes from. So I’m very pleased when any film in our genre [does well] โ not just superheroes, but action or sci-fi or anything. The success of Wonder Woman made me very happy because as I’ve said before in the press, I’d much rather the question be, ‘Oh gosh, what did you think about that successful female-led hero that came out a few years ago?’ Rather than the question I used to get, which was, ‘Are you afraid that people don’t want to see a female hero?’”
We certainly hope Captain Marvel continues that trend, and we’ve got plenty of faith it will.
Captain Marvel follows Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races. Set in the 1990s, Captain Marvel is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Captain Marvel stars Academy Award winner Brie Larson (Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou (Korath), Lee Pace (Ronan), Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan (Minn-Erva), Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, McKenna Grace, Kenneth Mitchell (Joseph Danvers), with Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), and Jude Law.
Captain Marvel launches on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5, 2019.