Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige Discusses The Villain Problem, Diversity, & What's Ahead For The MCU [Interview] - Page 2 of 3

Diversity is a big part of our conversation right now, you guys made a huge step with “Black Panther,” but we still not have a female-led Marvel film yet, though it’s obviously coming. Are you thinking about more female-led movies, female directors, and characters that represent the diversity of our world?
Yes, yes, yes and yes. Ana Boden, with her partner Ryan Fleck are filming as we speak on “Captain Marvel,” Ryan Coogler, a brilliant filmmaker, we very much he comes back for the next “Black Panther” film for us. And there are films we won’t announce until the release of ‘Avengers 4’ next year, but that we’re working on that will continue [need for diversity] both in front of and behind the camera. Those films won’t be one-offs either, they are the beginning of what we want to do more and more and more because we want our films to reflect the world that they exist in.

If we’re talking female characters, how about an already established on like Black Widow? I’m sure the fans would love to see that.
All of it is on the table as we start to decide what the future is beyond the next, untitled Avengers film. Earlier today we were asked about the character of Okoye and Shuri, Nakia in “Black Panther,” people are asking me about future “Captain Marvel” movies before we’re even finished shooting the first one. So it’s an amazingly privileged position to be in, to have these characters that are so beloved and that people clamoring to see them in future movies. The answer is, they will be in future movies, we’ll just announce when and how later.

So there’s lots of Untitled Marvel Film release dates out there, but no titles or characters yet, it sounds like you won’t announce any of those at Comic-Con and wait until after “Avengers 4” comes out?
Ideally, I think that’s what we’d like to do. We did a big event a couple of years ago where we announced like ten movies between 2014 and 2019 and we haven’t delivered all of those yet and we haven’t delivered the promise when we made that really big deal of announcing all those movies. And so now to make a big deal of “even more movies, before the movies that we already announced!” doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. We’re spending a lot our time, energy and creative passion into completing those movies –‘Infinity War,’ “Ant-Man & The Wasp,” “Captain Marvel,” ‘Untitled Avengers’ and even the next ‘Homecoming’ Spider-Man film. And we want to complete those and fulfill the promise of those and then reveal and discuss what’s to come.

There’s a lot of talk of the Disney/Fox merger and who knows when that happens. But say it happens tomorrow, the deal closes, does that affect your Phase 4 films or whatever that “phase” will be called?
[Pause] No, because any of that deal would take a while to get going and years from whenever and if ever it happens. So, certainly it won’t impact the five movies we’ve announced, and it probably wouldn’t impact anything for a handful of years after that. Because really, we’re not thinking about that. We’re thinking of delivering on what we promised. Any movie, especially for any characters we don’t have the rights to yet until someone tells us we do, would be even further after that.

Do you have any favorite characters from that Fox Universe that you’d love to have?
No, I mean, I think those are tremendous characters. I’m not going to pick one over the other of any of these characters because it’s too hard, but my career started with those characters on the “X-Men” films.