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It’s great to talk to the cast of Iron Man 2 to find out about the biggest movie of next year, but when you talk to Kevin Feige, you can find out about the next three years. He’s got Marvel working on Thor, Captain America and The Avengers while Iron Man 2 is in post. Here’s the latest update from Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, straight from the Comic Con press room.
Crave Online: How reticent were you to go on with a second movie? What were the choices you had to make to make this second movie a better than the original one?
Kevin Feige: Thankfully, the first film was a big enough of a success that nobody was reticent. Certainly the studio was like, “Make another one, make another one.” The fear always is to make it good and to improve upon what you did last time and it was well received but there were things we thought we could improve. That’s always the best part of the sequels. It’s two things: one, you get a chance to do it again and maybe improve elements that you disappointed with, even if the audience wasn’t, but it happened that we were on a few tiny, tiny things that we looked forward to redoing. And also, when you’ve got 50 years of comic book stories to tell, we had all sorts of stories we hadn’t gotten to yet. You know, an origin story is great and it’s kind of pre-packaged if you do it right. It’s the sequel that frees you up. We committed ourselves to a direction. We had Tony out himself as Iron Man in the last frame of the last movie and we were like, should we do this? We’re locking ourselves into something. And we said, yes, let’s do it. It’s locked us into something which has opened up the whole franchise in that senate scene that you saw. That’s kind of what the whole movie is like. Everyone knows who he is now and he has to deal with that.
Crave Online: When you brought the first one to Comic-Con, you just killed. How did the reaction this time around compare? How did you pick what you were going to show to top that?
Kevin Feige: It was very overwhelming out there. It was great. There was a standing ovation the minute Jon [Favreau] walked out so that was very different than it was last year. All that was great but we wanted the footage to speak for itself and we followed the method we did last time. We didn’t really get a chance to do a preamble but that’s not footage we would show to any crowd. We put that together for this crowd which is essentially bringing people into the cutting room and that senate scene is a long, raw, rough version of that scene. But this audience is very savvy and we give them credit for that.
Crave Online: Were there other things that you wanted to tweak for improvement?
Kevin Feige: Little things. I mean, really little things. I think our end battle this time will be slightly more epic in scale. It’s that balance of delivering the character. All we really care about in these movies are the characters, but also delivering a spectacle, which on the highway and the rooftop in the last movie was great and the connection between Jeff [Bridges] and Robert [Downey, Jr.] was great, but we wanted to give it a little more spectacle this time around for its finale.
Crave Online: How much pressure is there on you to deliver a movie that is going to be as commercially successful as the first one?
Kevin Feige: Tremendous amount of pressure.
Crave Online: How do you deal with that?
Kevin Feige: You just work hard. I mean, that’s all that we do out here is work very, very hard on the movie. I think we maybe stopped for about 4 weeks after the release of the first Iron Man and then jumped right back into it, and that continues for me through Thor and Captain America and the Avengers.
Crave Online: How is Zak Penn doing bouncing between three films to work on the Avengers script?
Kevin Feige: It’s great. We’re learning as we go. It’s a new thing. Jon clearly is enthusiastic about it, Ken Branagh is enthusiastic about it. Joe Johnston is just getting into the mix now on Cap so it’s actually fun having the screenwriters. They have conference calls amongst themselves in terms of what we’re doing. Sometimes we’ll change something. It’s a big dialogue back and forth. It’s the bullpen. We’re not reinventing the wheel here. It’s just on a much different scale.
Crave Online: Will you introduce more supporting Avengers in that film?
Kevin Feige: Probably, yeah, a few.
Crave Online: Is Scarlett’s Black Widow in it or are you thinking of doing that as a solo?
Kevin Feige: Maybe, yeah. She’s signed up for all of those should we be lucky enough to have the audience want to see them.
Crave Online: How much will Nick Fury be in these movies?
Kevin Feige: That remains to be seen. I think you saw a good chunk of it today. I think he’s gone on the record as saying he hasn’t busted into badass action mode yet. At the end of the first one, for those people patient enough to wait through the end credits, they met this guy named Nick Fury that they or Tony had no idea who he was. In this movie, he opens that door a little bit more for Tony and invites him to walk through it. Tony may or may not do that in this movie but Nick Fury is the conduit by which all the other characters will connect.
Crave Online: Scarlett said when she first met with you guys, she didn’t know which superhero she would be playing. Can you talk a little bit about that process?
Kevin Feige: Not really. I think she’s always been interested in doing a character like this for us. We were always talking with her about it.
