Exclusive: Kevin Feige Considering Leaving Marvel After Secret Wars
According to our trusted and proven sources, Kevin Feige looks to be leaving Marvel Studios after the upcoming Secret Wars.
There may not be as significant a figure in modern film as Kevin Feige, the President of Marvel Studios and the primary architect of the MCU. That may be a dramatic statement, but maybe only Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could claim to have impacted the film industry as much as Kevin Feige did with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That is why it is somewhat shocking to hear from our trusted and proven sources that Kevin Feige is considering leaving Marvel behind after the culmination of the upcoming MCU Phases, Secret Wars.
Kevin Feige is one of the rare film producers who is more of a creative force and a public figure than most of the directors that work under him. After spending his early career as an associate producer on the 20th Century Fox run of X-Men and Fantastic Four movies, Kevin became one of the top people at the studio by dint of his knowledge of Marvel Comics lore. He kickstarted the MCU with 2008’s Iron Man, which essentially was a self-financed independent movie starring a then-washed-up Robert Downey Jr. Obviously, Iron Man was successful, sequels and a shared universe followed, and the entire paradigm of modern cinema was changed for better or worse.
However, it seems that Kevin Feige may be looking to leave Marvel Studios due to disagreements with Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Chapek. Chapek became CEO of Disney in 2020, after making a name for himself in the theme park division of the mega-corporation. By all accounts, Kevin Feige was given largely free rein at Marvel by Disney, probably due to his having envisioned and successfully produced four of the top ten highest-grossing films of all time. However, this is a time of enormous change for the film industry as a whole and Chapek may be throwing his weight around a little bit more than Kevin Feige likes.
This may be a situation in which Bob Chapek cooks the goose that lays the golden Marvel eggs. While no one is infallible, Kevin Feige has an unparalleled track record of success with Marvel; even films that underwhelmed, like Eternals and Black Widow, can only be seen as disappointments in comparison to other Marvel movies. At this point, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is generally seen as the gold standard of shared universe franchises, and Kevin Feige is undeniably the pivotal figure behind that.
The recently announced Secret Wars event is presumably Kevin Feige’s attempt to recapture the epochal Marvel Studios success that was the combined Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. It has the potential to be an even bigger crossover event than those movies, with newly accessible characters like the X-Men and Fantastic Four joining the existing MCU heroes as well as multiversal variants of existing characters, like a new, younger version of Tony Stark. Secret Wars seems like the kind of balancing act that maybe only Kevin Feige could pull off, but maybe Marvel Studios will not be able to rely on him for all that much longer.
