Why Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige Loves “Breaking” the MCU

Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely offer insight on why Marvel Studios president and architect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Kevin Feige loves “breaking the toys” of the MCU.

“He gets excited, especially when a big swing is proposed,” Markus told THR, adding the producer “does seem to respond” to game-changing shakeups that lead to consequences reverberating throughout the shared universe.

“‘Take down S.H.I.E.L.D. Civil War.’ He sees the value in breaking the toys. He was always pressing for a good sized time jump and to make it permanent. ‘Do it. We’ll deal with it and it will just make it more interesting. Why would you undo it and go back to zero?’ If we went back five years and undid it, that’s five-and-a-half hours of movie that sort of has no point. You loop back around to the beginning and it never happened.”

2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, also penned by Markus and McFeely, revealed the organization overseen by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) was for decades infested by Hydra, resulting in its toppling by Captain America (Chris Evans) and allies.

In Captain America: Civil War — again written by the Avengers scribes — a schism between Cap and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) resulted in the disassembling of Earth’s mightiest heroes, which led to the splintered team failing to prevent Thanos (Josh Brolin) from achieving his goal of obliterating fifty percent of all life in the universe come Infinity War.

And in Endgame, as a direct result of that defeat, a five-years-later time jump reveals a severely depressed and out of shape Thor (Chris Hemsworth), a merged Bruce Banner and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and a retired Iron Man enjoying domestic life with a wife and child.

The trillions of lives vanished by Thanos’ snap were ultimately resurrected, but that snap — and the time jump with all its changes — still happened.

“It’s really important to own it,” McFeely said.

Though Endgame little touched on a world affected by three Infinity Stone-powered snaps, July’s Spider-Man: Far From Home will better explore the minutiae of what the MCU looks like after half the world’s formerly dead population returns overnight.

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