Last October, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige set up a press conference for a special announcement, which ended up being a presentation announcing Marvel Studios’ full line-up through 2019. One of the questions that came up at the time was whether we’d ever see Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a few months later, it was announced that Feige and Marvel Studios would indeed be co-producing the next Spider-Man movie.
This past week, they finally announced that the movie would be directed by Jon Watts, whose action movie Cop Car premiered at Sundance this past January, with actor Tom Holland (The Impossible) starring as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. That movie is currently scheduled for July 28, 2017 as a co-production between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios.
SuperHeroHype got on the phone with Feige to talk about Marvel’s more immediate achievement, which was the fact that nine years after it was announced, they were finally rolling out the Ant-Man movie.
During our far-too-short interview, Feige talked about how that partnership with Sony has been going.
“We’re producing that movie for Sony and in partnership with Amy Pascal, so it’s been going through the same process of any other Marvel film would, and it’s been great. Tom Rothman at Sony has been very supportive in the decisions and obviously the two big ones we announced this week.”
Having worked on the Marvel movies going back to Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie (on which Feige was credited as Associate Producer), Feige must have worked with Tom Rothman while the latter was running 20th Century Fox, so we wondered if that helped pave the way for their current relationship.
“It was a very different capacity. Marvel Studios as its own studio didn’t exist and I was not a full producer on any of those movies. It was a different relationship, but he was always very supportive of me personally.”
Another question some might be pondering is whether we might eventually see other Spider-Man characters appearing in the MCU down the road now that Marvel and Sony are working together, but Feige wasn’t quite ready to answer that question.
“Right now, it’s all about producing the new stand-alone Spider-Man movie,” he replied. “That’s what Sony is focused on. That’s what we’re focused on, and whatever happened before that or after that, sort of remains to be seen, but it’s all about producing the best Spider-Man movie we can, certainly within the Sony Universe, next July.” (Note: we’re not sure if Feige was referring to “next July” as the movie’s 2017 release date or if that was when they planned to start production, in July 2016.)
With that in mind, we asked whether there was anything from the previous incarnations of Spider-Man directed by Sam Raimi and Marc Webb that Feige might want to carry over to the new movie, to which he diplomatically responded, “We’re going to have it be its own thing but some of those Spider-Man films… I think Spider-Man 2 is one of the best superhero movies ever, so that’s a lot to live up to.”
Look for our full interview with Mr. Feige closer to the release of Ant-Man on Friday, July 17, as well as interviews with director Peyton Reed and the entire cast.
