Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige Breaks Silence on the Split With Marvel Entertainment and Ike Perlmutter

The time was 2015 and Marvel Studios was cementing itself as a major Hollywood studio. Guardians of the Galaxy had just come out and Kevin Feige and his team proved they could make a hit movie out of some of Marvel’s most unknown characters. It was about that time Disney chief Bob Iger ordered some corporate restructuring to take place, moving Feige and Marvel Studios out from under Marvel Entertainment chair Ike Perlmutter and straight under the tutelage of Walt Disney Studios chair Alan Horn. Iger himself has spoken to the decision in his recent memoir and now, Feige has added to the chatter on why that movie was made.

The mega-producer recently sat down with THR’s Scott Feinberg and revealed that yes, Perlmutter’s reported resistance to diverse characters was at least part of the change. “That’s part of it,” Feige said in response to the reports. “There’s a lot of sides to the story. You can pick up Bob Iger’s book The Ride of a Lifetime to learn more, but it made sense at that time. We had made ten movies or more that managerially, there was another way to go.”

Feige and Feinberg had been discussing various time markers in Feige’s career that stood out to him as major paradigm shifts for how things worked at Marvel Studios — that’s when he said another major marker was when Horn was hired by Iger. “In terms of markers, as you were saying, another one I’d say was very important for Marvel Studios and for me personally was when Bob Iger hired Alan Horn because Alan Horn is such a tremendous leader and such a tremendous mentor,” Feige said.

He added, “He came on just before or just after Avengers 1 came out and has been so supportive in what we’re doing and also has great guidance. He reads every draft and watches every cut. He’s not as versed in the Marvel lore as we are, which is important because we want to police ourselves and not get too far down in the weeds that we distance ourselves from our audience and he and Alan Bergman are great eyes for that.”

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