This week sees the release of Marvel Studios‘ “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” which means that press gets all sorts of access to Kevin Feige, who has talked up all sorts of wide-ranging MCU topics including their gestating “Blade” reboot, finally commenting on pivoting from Jonathan Majors‘ Kang The Conqueror, and confirmed that “Loki” writer Michael Waldron (who was once writing “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty“) is “helping” Stephen McFeely on “Avengers: Doomsday.”
A recent roundtable press conference had Feige speaking to a bunch of journalists (including quotes from the Marvel head collected from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline). One of the major projects asked about was their “Blade” reboot, where Feige backed up that Ryan Coogler‘s “Sinners” end up taking their period costumes as the project is now firmly given a “modern day” setting, with Mahershala Ali is very much involved (despite recent wayward reactions to “Blade” questions).
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” Feige explained of those delays. “It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time…’We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Feige also mentioned that their aim with “The Fantastic Four” reboot was to avoid some headaches they had with “Eternals,” where those characters had been hiding in plain sight throughout multiple Phases, and the Multiverse/standalone aspect made “homework” not a requirement from the audience.
“We didn’t want to have the ‘Eternals’ issue of ‘Where were they, where have they been, how come they didn’t help with Thanos?'” Feige explained why “Fantastic Four” will be different from other recent MCU entries. “We wanted them to be apart from our reality so that we didn’t have to say, ‘Oh look, they were hiding over here.'”
“It was a unique aesthetic that felt like it could absolutely be its own world, its own reality,” said Feige of the 1960s aesthetic used for “Fantastic Four” (the setting was once the advice given by “X-Men: First Class” director Matthew Vaughn, who produced the last reboot). “And when we show it to audiences in the screening process that we do leading up to it, people just accept it right off the bat and feel liberated that they can just enjoy what’s ahead of them.” He added, “It is no-homework-required.”
The studio head explained the reasoning why they pivoted from Majors’ Kang to RDJ‘s Doom for the next “Avengers” installment, suggesting the character wasn’t big enough for those “Avengers” sequels and getting access to Doctor Doom post-merger was a big part of it, “We had started even before what had happened to the actor happened, we had started to realize that Kang wasn’t big enough, wasn’t Thanos, and that there was only one character that could be that, because he was that in the comics for decades and decades,” Feige told the group of journalists. “Because of the Fox acquisition, we finally had it, and it was Dr. Doom. So we had started talking about Dr. Doom even before we officially pivoted from Kang. And in fact, I had started talking with Robert [Downey Jr.] about this audacious idea before ‘Ant-Man 3’ even came out. It was a long plan that we had, to take one of our greatest characters and utilize one of our greatest actors.”
Lastly, Feige also reiterates that MCU roles like Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Steve Rogers (the former Captain America) are still potentially going to be recast down the line, just like the upcoming James Bond in Denis Villeneuve‘s “Bond 26” or the recent hiring of David Corenswet for James Gunn‘s “Superman” reboot. While not exactly a new sentiment from Feige, this comes as many folks are bracing for a possible MCU rest after “Avengers: Secret Wars” as a way to introduce other rebooted Marvel teams, like their new version of the X-Men (Jake Schreier reportedly directing and expected to cast a wave of new actors).
“Reboot is a scary word,” Feige said about talk of rebooting the MCU after “Secret Wars.” “Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Reset, singular timeline, we’re thinking along those lines.” Adding that indeed “‘X-Men’ is where that will happen next.”
“Fantastic Four,” which already has some strong buzz behind it, heads to screens on July 25, and “Avengers: Doomsday” is poised to arrive on December 18, 2026 (barring any more date shifts from Disney).
- Christopher Marc
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