Kevin Feige’s Fight To Change Marvel Studios From The Inside Almost Cost Him His Job
After more than a decade of success with the Marvel Cinematic Universe,Kevin Feigeis currently riding high as theChief Creative Officerof Marvel Entertainment, overseeing the company’s film, television, and publishing branches. But according to a new interview with MCU actorMark Ruffalo, Feige nearly lost his job while taking a stand for more inclusion and diversity in the movies he was developing.
These battles behind closed doors at Marvel have been written about in the past. They all boiled down to stories aboutIke Perlmutter, who served as the CEO of Marvel Entertainment for more than a decade. He’s a notorious recluse who is rarely photographed in public, and rumors of his stubborn refusal to include female, black, and LGBT characters in Marvel Studios movies have been floating around for years. (Perlmutter is also one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors.) We knew that Feigenearly left Marvelwhen Perlmutter demanded thatCaptain America: Civil Warbe given a smaller budget, but according to Ruffalo, the battle was raging years before that.
In an interview withThe Independent, he said:
“When we did the firstAvengers, Kevin Feige told me, ‘Listen, I might not be here tomorrow.’ And he’s like, ‘Ike does not believe that anyone will go to a female-starring superhero movie. So if I am still here tomorrow, you will know that I won that battle.’ Because Kevin wanted black superheroes, women superheroes, LGBT superheroes. He changed the whole Marvel universe. We now have a gay superhero on the way, we have black superheroes, we have female superheroes – Scarlett Johansson has her movie coming out, we have Captain Marvel, they are doing She-Hulk next. No other studio is being that inclusive on that level. They have to, though. This is the f***ing world.”
Part of me wonders if Ruffalo might have accidentally mixed up the timeline a little here. We know that Marvel Studios wasrestructured in 2015, removing Feige from under Perlmutter’s control and giving him the freedom to start telling stories with more diverse characters in leading roles. A report at that time claimed it was the relative failure of 2015’sAvengers: Age of Ultronwhich gave Feige the leverage to be able to make his case for the restructuring to Marvel’s overlords at Disney, so I wonder if Ruffalo meant the secondAvengersinstead of the firstAvengerswhen he told this story. I wouldn’t blame him for not being able to keep all of those movies straight in his head.
But if Ruffalo is right about this clash happening back in 2012, Feige has been fighting for diversity and inclusion for a longer than we thought behind the scenes, seemingly even willing to lose his job over it at a time when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just starting to establish itself as a truly dominant force in Hollywood. Regardless of the timing, stories like these go a long way toward answering questions about why it’s taken such a long time to get female-centric and non-white superhero movies in the MCU.
