For many years, we’ve all been under the illusion that Kevin Feige was the man running Marvel Studios. But, according to the season finale of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” Kevin Feige is actually K.E.V.I.N., an artificial intelligence bot. The show wasn’t always planned to end that way, though.
In the episode, now streaming on Disney+, we find Jennifer Walters back at Emil Blonsky’s retreat, hoping to escape from the havoc that Intelligencia wreaked on her life. As it turns out, Intelligencia is having their own retreat at the lodge, with Abomination as a guest speaker. Naturally, all hell breaks loose when Jen stumbles into their meeting, interrupts Todd on stage — because, as many people guessed, he was HulkKing — and is informed that he stole her blood to give himself Hulk powers.
But before things can get too crazy, Jen herself stops the action by breaking the fourth wall — literally. In an homage to the Jack Byrne run of the comics, where She-Hulk tries to rip through the pages because she’s angry about the story, this time Jen breaks through Disney+, traveling to Marvel Studios to take it up directly with Kevin. Only, in this universe, Kevin is actually K.E.V.I.N. — or Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus. But according to head writer Jessica Gao, she and her team did consider making Kevin a real person, just in an equally absurd way.
“Initially, my first pitch was that, when she finally got to Kevin’s office, we would stunt cast it with a handsome, debonair actor, like George Clooney,” Gao told TheWrap. “And he’d be in a tuxedo holding like a glass of scotch, and that would be Kevin. And we were just like, that’s Kevin Feige. That’s actually the real Kevin.”
It was Gao’s second pitch that ended up sticking though, making K.E.V.I.N. a robot. Sadly, it was never a possibility that Feige would appear as himself.
“Kevin Feige would never request to be in a Marvel project,” Gao said with a laugh.
That said, the real Feige did have a big hand in the trajectory of the episode. Gao explained that she went through “so many iterations” of what the finale might be. “I mean, truly, like, in the double digits of what it could be,” she said. She added that she struggled quite a bit with the story because she felt “this is the point in which I have to start doing the Marvel thing,” and follow the typical formula.
“And I think that’s why nothing was working. You know, over these like, dozens of versions of a finale, it just — nothing felt right. And that was for a reason,” Gao said. “And it was human Kevin that said, ‘Why? There is no reason to do that.’ Like, ‘This is not a Marvel movie, this is a show that from the beginning, we’ve said is going to be completely different than anything that Marvel has done. And this is going to be completely new territory. And that’s exciting. And that’s fun. So why stop here? There’s absolutely no reason for you to just do the typical Marvel thing.’ And it was so wonderful and freeing for him to say that.”
For what it’s worth though, that receptionist that made She-Hulk sign an NDA? That was a real receptionist. His name was Matt Wilkie, and he was the one who actually had to ask Gao to sign her NDAs when she first started meeting with Marvel.
“My dream was that somebody would watch the show, see that and then get a meeting at Marvel and then they’d walk into that exact same lobby and see the exact same guy tell them the exact same thing,” Gao said. “But Matt Wilkie has since then [been] very rightfully promoted. But I will hold it against him forever because… he’s ruined the long-term joke!”
All nine episodes of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” are now streaming on Disney+.