Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has announced that the company is set to see a major shake-up in terms of output in the future, outlining its focus on quality over quantity and the reduction of TV projects, while also hinting at more meaningful character crossovers in store.
Announced during a roundtable with the press, Feige admitted that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has seen a barrage of new additions over the past few years, oversaturating the superhero movie market in the process. “We produced 50 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019,” he said. “We’ve had well over 100 hours of stories in half the time. That’s too much.”
“For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” Feige added, explaining that the drastic increase in Marvel films meant it was difficult for its executives to keep up. “We spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga, saying that’s never going to happen to us. We always had more characters than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month. Suddenly, there’s a mandate to make more. And we go, ‘Well, we do have more.’”
This certainly has affected the performance of recent Marvel films, with Thunderbolts* attaining one of the lowest-grossing box offices in the MCU so far at US$371 million globally despite receiving positive reviews. In fact, as reported by Variety, only six out of its 13 films since 2020 have hit the US$500 million global box-office milestone, which is in stark contrast to three of its 22 films pre-pandemic.
To this end, Feige explained that Marvel’s feature output will slow down to at most three films a year, which is in line with a previous statement by Disney CEO Bob Iger in May last year. TV series, on the other hand, is set to lessen even further, with only one live-action show per year, with the shows they do make featuring less of an overlap with the movies to prevent audiences from having to watch their entire backlog to keep up with the plot.
Still, this doesn’t mean that characters in film and TV will be entirely separate either, as 2026’s upcoming web-slinging sequel, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, will feature an appearance from Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, aka the Punisher. According to Feige, the film will shift focus back to the streets of New York and will mark the beginning of a “proper Spider-Man” era in the MCU.
“So when you do that, you say, okay, who are the other street-level characters that we’ve never seen him interact with?” he added in a statement to Collider, “And of course, I love that The Punisher started in a Spider-Man comic. That great cover… I don’t want to say too much, but [director Destin Daniel Cretton] is doing an amazing job right now on that movie, which starts shooting very soon. And he’s got eight or nine comic covers up on his wall in his art department that he is bringing to life in this movie, which is super cool.”
Even though Marvel’s TV show output and character crossovers will be reduced, Feige firmly believes that “it would be fun to see [characters in] multiple places”, which alludes to more curated, meaningful appearances. Let’s just hope that this focus on quality, not quantity, will work in Marvel’s favour and bring the studio back to its heyday once more.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Ting Wei
Yonk
