Kevin Feige Looks Forward to Being the Underdog Once Again: “I Prefer Being Able to Surprise”

2023 turned out to be disastrous for Disney and for Marvel Studios. Most of their movies flopped, and TV shows were met with mixed reviews at best. Disney concluded its first year in a long time not having a billion-dollar movie, and Marvel Studios concluded the year with ‘The Marvels’ which is officially the lowest-grossing movie in the MCU, and the first movie not to break the $100 million threshold at the domestic box office.

Disney unceremoniously found most of its projects on the list of box-office flops for 2023, which prompted a change in the way the company releases projects. Iger announced that they will be significantly reducing their creative output, releasing 3 movies per year at most, and 2 shows.

Despite bad news all around, Feige and Louis D’Esposito remain hopeful. Louis D’Esposito, speaking for Empire, claims that staying on top would be the worst thing that could happen to them, as it wouldn’t force them to improve the quality.

It’s been a rough time. If we just stayed on top, that would have been the worst thing that could have happened to us. We took a little hit, we’re coming back strong. Maybe when you do too much, you dilute yourself a little bit, we’re not going to do that anymore. We learned our lesson. Maybe two to three films a year and one or two shows, as opposed to doing four films and four shows.

Feige also looks forward to being the underdog, he looks forward to being able to prove once again that they can surprise fans with otherworldly storytelling:

It’s nice to be able to rally behind one feature project this year. I’m much more comfortable being the underdog. I prefer being able to surprise, and exceed expectations. So it does seem like the last year, which has not been ideal, has set us up well for that.

Whether D’Esposito and Feige truly aim to improve the quality remains to be seen. Fans have been complaining for quite some time now that flat stories with diversity mixed on just to be able to check boxes no longer works. Across all complaints, one thing remains in common with all of them, Marvel no longer has interesting stories worth telling, or so it appears, the fans of the source material know that this can’t be further from the truth.

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