Marvel Studios President of Production Kevin Feige recently spoke of Marvel U's success in film as well as its future.
On quality:
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It has to do with the source material and the stories that Marvel has been telling for 70 years. It's due almost entirely to the fact that we've had writers and artists and creators that have been putting together some of the most amazing stories in any literature… Marvel has an embarrassment of riches. Technology is at a point where we can realize these things without them looking goofy or cheesy – which they still can, by the way. You can spend $500 million on something and still have it look terrible. That's the challenge. But certainly the odds are that with the proper care, technology will allow us to pull off something great.
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On how "Batman & Robin" ironically boosted the comic movie business:
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If you look at the end at the first incarnation of Batman, the failure of those movies was actually a boost not just for Batman, eventually, but for all of our films, and directly for X-Men. It showed people who were running studios that it's not just about money and visual effects. And on X-Men, of course, it was the attention to the comic book. Even if the costumes aren't the same, or the visual effects aren't there, if we just pay attention to the characters and get the core emotions of who they are, they're fascinating, and three-dimensional, and not cartoon-ish at all. Very few comic characters are "cartoony" …And with X-Men, it was unique at the time to show that on-screen, but here we are eight years later with the biggest summer ever for comic book movies.
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On Avengers:
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That's the fun part. The fun of a group-hero comic like The Avengers is not that there's five heroes running around together, it's that these are five heroes who you've been enjoying for years in their own titles coming together. And as different as Thor is from Iron Man is from The Incredible Hulk is from Captain America, when you throw them all together, you can play off that. You can see how the characters interact; you have the fun of how out of place Thor is… That's what his entire character arc is in Ultimates. You can have fun with it. But certainly it would be a mistake to start pigeon-holing or holding back certain characters just so they can "fit" into certain places we'd like to put them in later. It's a scripting issue how you make movies that can stand on their own two feet that can stand alone… and at the same time, reward fans for paying attention.
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On the future:
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Wolverine is coming out next May and the future of the X-Men franchise will be determined. Iron Man 2 is actively moving forward. We're well under way on that one with a May 7, 2010 release date. Thor is right on the heels of that with a July 16, 2010 release. The following year, in 2011, it's May 6th for Captain America and July 15th for The Avengers. So, the next three years of my life will be those four characters! Excellent characters and amazing worlds – I'm very, very excited. And as you know from having watched Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, anybody can pop up anywhere at anytime.
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This guys needs to train WB's execs, maybe they'll get their act together as well. The X-Men line is interesting... I think the franchise could be rebooted if Wolverine doesn't meet Iron-Man/Spidey 2/X2. Would that be a bad thing? If Marvel takes X-Men back from Fox, we could have Hugh Jackman rubbing elbows with Downy's Stark, Pitt(?)'s Thor, and most ambitiously Norton's Hulk. After X3... it may be high time.
In any case, awesome time for comic fans abroad.