Many of you are on the edge of your seats, anxious about the latest adventure from Marvel Studios, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. By now, you have heard all about my press trip to Los Angeles, but what I haven’t told you (yet) is that I sat down to interview some of the familiar faces you will see on the big screen this week: Scarlett Johansson, Anthonie Mackie and Chris Evans, to name a few.
I also had the opportunity to sit down with Kevin Feige, who is not only the producer of Captain America, he is also the president of Marvel. …And it doesn’t get any cooler than that!
During the interview, one of the first questions was almost the obvious – what’s next for Marvel? Read below to find out the plan and hear a little spoiler about what you might expect to see in the film.
Can you tell us what comes next?
Kevin Feige: I can tell you what we’re actually on. We’re spending a lot of time now in the cutting room on “Guardians of the Galaxy”, which comes out August 1st. We just released the teaser for it recently. In about 2 weeks, we start filming “Avengers Age of Ultron”, so that’s coming up very fast and that will be the next movie up, in May of 2015. In about 10 weeks, we start filming “Ant-Man” with Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd, which comes out in July of 2015.
Talk about the controversy around Winter Soldier.
Kevin Feige: Well no they had already done it. You know, Comic Fans always knew sort of two things in — in about (the) peak, characters die and come back to life — in Comics, in Soap Operas, like in any sort of fiction all the time. But there are two Characters in the Marvel Universe that are never gonna come back to life, Uncle Ben and Bucky Barnes.
And about 10 years ago or 12 years ago, a Comic Book writer, Ed Brubaker went to Publishing. I didn’t — I didn’t have anything to do with it. He went to Publishing and said, I have an idea to bring Bucky Barnes back. And I’m sure they’re like what are you talking about? You can’t do that. And they pitched the idea and it was great! And it was the Winter Soldier idea and it was done so well and I think fans went No, you can’t– Oh that’s great, we love that. We just took the successful blueprint that they had already done and brought it into this movie!
Is there any hope to get other Characters with other Studios?
Kevin Feige: No I think — I think we’re all, they’re busy. SONY’s busy working on Spiderman Movies, Spiderman II is coming out very soon. Fox is working very hard on X-Man and they’ve got an X-Men Movie coming out very soon. And we clearly, spending a lot of time doing our two Movies, two Movies a year. I don’t want to say Never say Never necessarily, but I don’t know that that would happen any time soon, and we’re certainly not planning for it. It’s Phase 12.
Will we be surprised?
Kevin Feige: Well I think you probably will be and I think if you tune in after — after the movie comes out, the repercussions will be felt.
It does trickle through.
Kevin Feige: That’s the idea! This script, the idea for this movie exists before the show so they know what we’re doing.
What are you most excited about?
Kevin Feige: I’m most excited about how the world reacted to that teaser! I’m very, very happy with because that teaser, you know, represents the tone and the vibe of the movie quite overtly. So we were sort of leading with our most unique and different element, which is not always what movie markers do. They sort of go ‘Oh hey look, it fits into this box, get comfortable with an audience.’ But we were leading with what the most unique elements of the movie are, which I’m very happy with and more happy that people seem to be on board with it.
As we’ve been talking about today, each Marvel Studio’s movie needs to be unique, needs to feel like its own fresh entity but Guardians takes that to the extreme, I mean, it really is more different — and a fresh original Movie. It happens to be based on a Marvel Comic Book but for all intensive purposes though, from an audience who has no idea who those characters are from the comics, it is an original movie put out in the time.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is in theaters on April 4, 2014.