What exactly is the main goal of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Ever since 2008's Iron Man, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has been hard at work with other creatives in making some of the best comic book movie content ever to exist. Needless to say, they've been quite successful, seeing as the MCU has been going strong for nearly fifteen years at this point.
Feige and company don't even let those superhero fatigue naysayers get to them, feeling confident that their strength is in being able to utilize any genre they want.
But how do they do it? What exactly makes it all work?
According to Feige, one goal is more crucial than all the rest.
The Goal of Marvel Studios
While speaking on The Movie Business Podcast, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige commented on some of the behind-the-scenes processes behind the MCU, and what the company’s most crucial goal is.
The executive shared that they try to “do a post-mortem on every project,” even the highly successful ones:
"We do a post-mortem on every project, or at least we try to, if we're not too busy with the next project, to sit and discuss what went right and what went wrong. And I remember we started doing that, we were asked to do it for the first time on 'Iron Man 1.' And we call them 'post-mortems' now, at the time it was a 'what went wrong' meeting. We were asked to do a 'what went wrong' meeting for Iron Man. And I thought, 'What went wrong? This movie's a giant hit, it launched a whole studio? Why do we have to do a what went wrong meeting?'"
According to Fiege, it’s a great habit for them, one that also helps hone in on their biggest goal, “entertaining the audience [at every] turn:”
"That's a horrible way to put it, which is what I was reacting to. But it is actually great to sit and go, 'Here's what was done, here's how we could have done it better.' And we do that on every project. And I guess to distill it down of what lessons is learned is, entertain the audience [at every] turn. Frank Capra has a quote that our Co-President Louis D'esposito quotes often, which is basically distilled down to, entertain first."
He continued, noting that “you can have as many beautiful messages” as one could possibly have, however, if “you are not entertaining first, it will fall on deaf ears:”
"You can have as many beautiful messages, and beautiful life theories, and beautiful thematics that you want to put into the world, that all of us do, and all of our filmmakers do. But if you are not entertaining first, it will fall on deaf ears. And I think that has always been the way, and that thankfully when you are making the kind of movies that you love to see then that will also go into entertaining yourself, which is what we also try to do here at Marvel Studios."
Marvel Studios Has Successfully Entertained
For the most part, it goes without saying that Marvel Studios has gone above and beyond entertaining audiences around the world. Something like Avengers: Endgame was a spectacle on a scale never before seen—cinematic history.
Feige's mentality behind evaluating their projects post-mortem is also a healthy habit to have. In fact, it's likely directly responsible for some of the many drastic changes at Marvel Studios over the past few months—Blade getting a fresh start, Armor Wars turning into a movie, Echo getting delayed, and more.
Not to mention how those changes were also coming right off the back of Phase 4, which has been more than a little rocky for many. Despite that and the disappointments some of those projects may have brought to fans, the world clearly hasn't lost all hope in the MCU just yet.
Marvel Studios' next project, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, hits theaters on February 17, and fans are already anxious to get themselves in those theater seats.
