Kevin Feige talks GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, DR STRANGE and ANT-MAN

It’s going to be busy at the ol’ Marvel studios for the next couple of years. Guardians of the Galaxy is out soon, Avengers 2 is busy filming and there are a ton  more films in the pipeline. You can thank studio head honcho for steering that massive ship into calmer waters, as he took the time to talk to TotalFilm about the upcoming slate of films at the house of ‘Nuff Said.

With Guardians of the Galaxy opening on August 1, Feige took the time to talk about this latest entry in the Marvel Movie franchise possibly being the start of a whole new series of movies, a Star Wars for a new generation. If you don’t factor in those upcoming new Star Wars films which are meant for a new generation, that is:

Every time we make a movie, we focus on the single movie, the importance of doing the best version we can to introduce a new audience to the characters. So we don’t have, necessarily, two or three or four movies planned because if we have a good idea – a fun idea for a scene or a cool character – we put it in this movie because we know if the first movie doesn’t work, there won’t be any movies after that.

“That being said, there are dozens and dozens of Guardians Of The Galaxy storylines – there’s a group that came about in the ’60s, they were revamped again in the ’80s and they changed into this incarnation that you see in this movie about eight or nine years ago – so there are a lot of other characters and worlds and stories. So should this film work, should the audience come out for this one, there are definitely places we can take it and we have ideas of where we’d like to go with it, but really all the energy goes into the first movie first.

In other words, mo’ money mo’ Guardians. As for Doctor Strange, Feige commented on the casting for that film, with the lead actor being expected to carry a film which dips far more into the supernatural than any other film that Marvel has released thus far:

Scott Derrickson has been announced as the director. Doctor Strange is a character that I’ve been interested in for many, many years and that I’ve talked about in interviews for probably 14 years, because I believe it’s very, very important for us to explore every nook and cranny of the comic-book universe and we’ve done the street-level heroes, and we’ve done the billionaire superheroes [on Earth]. We’ve now done the cosmic side with Thor and Avengers and most obviously with Guardians, but there’s a whole other side of the Marvel comics, which is that supernatural side – the interdimensional side of the Marvel universe, and Doctor Strange is, I believe, our entry point into that other realm, which has dozens of characters and storylines all of its own.

So Strange is very, very important, not just because it’s an amazing character study, and a journey of a man who’s gone from this very arrogant surgeon to somebody who is quite zen and literally keeps all of reality together on a daily basis, but it also is going to open up a whole other side of storytelling for our movies. So we’re about to hire a writer to redo a draft, and we think we’ll be casting probably in the next month or two, and announcing an actor, and then we get into production in the spring of next year.

And now for the elephant in the room. With Peyton Reed on directing duties and Adam McKay handling writing, Ant-Man has some solid talent behind it. But the two combined ain’t no Edgar Wright, who departed the film after years of pre-production work. That puts the film in an uneviable position, with fans now upset over the departure of Wright and Ant-Man being a risky new film for Marvel.

Feige isn’t worried though:

Ant-Man is still going to come out on 17 July [2015], we start filming this August. Edgar Wright, who I’ve known for many years, who wrote the draft with Joe Cornish – much of the movie will still be based very much on that draft and the DNA of what Edgar has created up to this point, but Peyton Reed has stepped in [to direct].

Adam McKay, a very good writer is reworking parts of the script – not the entirety of the script, but some of it – and it’s going to, we believe, come to life in the best version of Ant-Man that we could possibly make. Again Ant-Man is a very important character for us. We like that people don’t necessarily know what it is, we like that it sounds sort of strange when you first hear the notion of Ant-Man, or a hero that can shrink, but he’s a very key Marvel character: he’s a key Avenger. He’s an important character we want to bring into our universe and Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and an amazing cast all set to start in August, we believe that we’re on the road to the best version of Ant-Man that we could have.

 

Last Updated: June 23, 2014