Marvel Chief Talks Young Avengers Team-Up Potential, Affirms Daredevil Will Ignore Events Of Thunderbolts*
Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige held a roundtable with members of the press ahead of the July 25 release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and when it comes to small-screen fare, the takeaway seems to be this:
Characters may crossover between TV and film. But storylines...? Not necessarily.
As shared by our sister site Variety, Feige noted that from 2009 to 2017, the MCU produced 50 hours of content. Since then, in half the amount of time, more than 100 hours of film and TV projects have been produced, fueled in part by a "mandate" to feed Disney+, which launched in late 2019.
"For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality," Feige admitted. "Suddenly, there's a mandate to make more. And we go, 'Well, we do have more.'"
That firehose of live-action TV fare — led by WandaVision in January 2021, and followed by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion, Loki Season 2, Echo, Agatha All Along, Daredevil: Born Again and, most recently, Ironheart — is arguably to blame for moviegoers feeling there's too much "homework" to be done before heading to the Cineplex.
"Thunderbolts* was a very good movie, but nobody knew that title, and many of those characters were from [Disney+] shows," Feige noted. "There was that residual effect of [audiences believing], 'I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is?'"
As a result, now when it comes to the Disney+ series, "allowing a TV show to be a TV show" — and not some instrumental part of the larger MCU — "is what we're returning to," Feige said.
For example, Feige on the one hand affirmed, "No," the events of Thunderbolts* (which subject poor New York City to another otherworldly peril), will not be referenced on Daredevil: Born Again, which is also Big Apple-based and recently wrapped Season 2. But Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle aka The Punisher will crossover to the big screen for Tom Holland's fourth Spider-Man film.
"Where we have great actors playing great characters, I think it would be fun to see them multiple places," Feige explained.
On the TV front, Feige cheered Ms. Marvel star Iman Vellani as "one of the greatest bits of casting we've ever done," but he stopped short of saying when or if we will see her again, following her role opposite Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris in 2023's The Marvels.
That film, after all, ended with a stinger in which Vellani's Kamala Khan dropped in on Hawkeye's Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), to say that she's "putting together a team" of young heroes such as themselves.
Feige told reporters that a Young Avengers team-up film or TV series "potentially" could happen, but stressed that "it comes down to where's the best story and where is the best strange alchemy. Who would be fun to see them with? Each other, because that's what the Young Avengers are, but also mixing it up more."