Marvel Studios head honcho, Kevin Feige recently spoke to Empire and while, in places, he covered similar ground previously at CineEurope, he did expand on the Ant-Man / Edgar Wright “creative differences” debacle saying
“The disappointing thing for me is not being able to make a movie with him, right now; it’s just the personal relationship. And it was amicable and we sat in a room together and said this isn’t working. I just wish I or he had figured that out somewhere in the eight years leading up to it.But we said, OK, let’s put out a statement and let people know it’s not screaming and fighting and dramatic. It just came to came down to creative differences. And I said, ‘Well, nobody’s ever gonna believe that because that’s what everybody always says.’ And Edgar said ‘But that is what it is.’ He was nervous about what the perception would be, and I said to Edgar ‘Don’t worry about it, because the perception will be that the evil studio squashes the innocent filmmaker’. That will be the perception no matter what, and that is the perception, but it’s much more complicated than that.
Feige though, wouldn’t get into specifics of what those creative differences were, with the Marvel Studios president stating “Well, it’s not worth, right now, going into that in super-specifics. I wish it wasn’t as late in the day as it was, but it just had become clear that there was an impasse that we had never reached before. We’ve worked with lots of unbelievable talented filmmakers like Edgar before, and of course there are disagreements along the way. There’s always been disagreements, whether big or small; that’s the collaborative nature of filmmaking and in particular the collaborative nature at Marvel that has producers, not just me, that are very involved and very opinionated. We had always found a way around it, a way to battle through it and emerge on the other side with a better product. At no point do we hire filmmakers who do everything we say, and at no point do we hire filmmakers that we let just do anything they want. There is always a middle ground that we find, and it just became clear that both of us was just being too polite over the past eight years I guess! Then it was clear that, ‘Oh you’re really not gonna stop talking about that note?’ ‘Oh, you’re really not gonna do that note?’ Alright this isn’t working.
And when it comes to DC movies, Empire asked Feige how does he feel about DC coming up against Marvel (keep in mind Batman v Superman is released on the same day as Captain America 3, May 6th 2016 ) to which he replied “I don’t think it is quite far to say DC is finally getting their act together. The Dark Knight movies were rather successful and genre-defining, they altered the genre in big ways. So I think there has always been competition that way. I mean Iron Man was the number one movie of 2008 until The Dark Knight came along, and I loved it. frankly. I love that the number 1 and the number 2 movies of that year, and it has happened a number of times since then, being comic-book movies, even if it wasn’t one we made. Here we are now, 14 years since the first Marvel movie I worked on. At that point it had been eight years and for about those eight years people had been asking ‘How much longer gonna last?’ ‘When are people gonna get tired of these movies? And my answer always was ‘People only get tired if a whole slew of terrible ones come out’. And it was our job to make sure that doesn’t happen. If there are other people out there interested in that not happening as well, I’m all for it!So I continue to be all for quality entertainment for moviegoers to enjoy on weekends. If it is on the same weekend I enjoy it slightly less. But we are doing what we’ve always done, which is sticking to our plan and sticking to our vision for the movies going forward and we have a very large vision that we’re working on for Cap 3 and for all the threes movies and just because another movie plops down onto one of ours doesn’t mean we are going to alter that. Maybe we should, but we’re not going to.”
It’s a fairly decent interview and Kevin Feige is always a fascinating speaker. The full interview is available on the Empire podcast and over on their site too.
