While right-wing backlash against Hollywood’s efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — has led studios to back off of corporate efforts to advance the practice, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said he stands by his studio’s efforts over the past several years to increase representation on set and on the big screen with characters like Black Panther and Ms. Marvel, and suggested that the MCU won’t be pivoting away from that.
“I said this before ‘woke’ and ‘DEI’ became a thing and I’m still saying it after: Marvel is the world outside your window,” Feige told reporters on Friday. “It’s not Gotham City and Metropolis. This is New York and L.A.. And yes, there’s also Wakanda and Asgard, but it is all made up of the people who make up our world.”
In 2018, Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” became one of Marvel’s biggest box office and cultural hits, grossing more than $700 million in the United States and earning Feige his first Oscar nomination when it became the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture.
The wild success of the film added more fuel to the conversation around diversity and representation in movies and TV and how Hollywood could change its system to eliminate the prejudices that lead to fewer opportunities for women and filmmakers and actors of color.
But in recent years and now with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, many Hollywood studios have quietly backed off of DEI programs, either due to executives hired to run such programs exiting the companies or mounting pressure from the Trump administration to shut them down. Marvel’s parent company, Disney, rebranded its DEI program this past February to remove references to “diversity & inclusion,” though that didn’t stop Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr from launching a probe into the company.
As for Marvel, the studio found some success with diverse heroes aside from “Black Panther,” with films like “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which set a Labor Day weekend box office opening record despite the fact that moviegoers had not yet fully returned to theaters in 2021 following a year of pandemic closures.
But on the flip side, Anthony Mackie’s big-screen debut as the new Captain America in “Brave New World” failed to pass $500 million at the worldwide box office earlier this year with theaters back at full strength — at least as much as they can be in a post-shutdown market — while the 2023 film “The Marvels,” starring Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris as an all-female superhero trio, became the first MCU film to fail to gross $100 million domestic.
Despite that, Feige says he’s extremely proud of Vellani’s performance as Kamala Khan, aka. Ms. Marvel, in both “The Marvels” and her own 2022 Disney+ series introducing her. He called Vellani “one of the greatest bits of casting we’ve ever done” alongside Tom Holland, who became a star after being casted as Spider-Man in 2016.
And while he remained coy about Marvel’s future plans, he suggested that the poor performance of “The Marvels” would not mean that Ms. Marvel would be kicked to the curb.
“I think [Iman] is awesome, both in real life and on the show, and I can’t wait to see her in the future,” he said.
He extended that possibility of seeing other characters introduced to the MCU since “Avengers: Endgame” in other films and TV shows beyond the next two “Avengers” films, which are expected to be stuffed with heroes when they hit theaters in 2026 and 2027.
Feige acknowledged that there may be longer intervals between characters appearing as Marvel Studios scales down its rate of production from the relentless pace seen from 2021 to 2023 as Disney sought to fill its streaming service with new films and TV shows. He said that Disney and Marvel learned from that period that there such a thing as too much for audiences, and that it is “okay to take a beat.”
“It always comes down to where the best story is and which characters would be great interacting with each other,” he said.
