Kevin Feige talks Age of Ultron and beyond

Kevin Feige isn’t just Marvel Studio head… he’s a fan and he loves to talk about the characters in the cinematic universe… and we love to hear him.

At SDCC  he sat and chatted to Collider about, well, everything in the movie-universe.

He said that Ultron was Joss Whedon’s only choice for Avengers 3: “What do you mean ‘what do you do?’”, Whedon said to him, “You do one thing. It’s Ultron.”

Ultron has been lurking in the Marvel movies for a while: “every choice that was made in Iron Man 3, The Dark World, and Winter Soldier, was all to make those movies as good as we could make them, but also knowing that it means things would be very very different at the start of Avengers 2 than they were at the end of Avengers.”

Will Thanos be in Avengers: Age Of Ultron? “I think Thanos does what he wants and shows up where he wants to. And I’m not going to tell him otherwise, so you don’t know exactly. Smirking at the end of the first Avengers. By the way, we’re still making Avengers 2, so nothing’s definitive one way or the other actually.”

Ronan may be the villain in Guardian of the Galaxy but there is a big plan there too, especially when it comes to Thanos: “We wanted Ronan to be the bad guy. We wanted to focus in the creation of the guardians team itself, so we didn’t want to spend too much time with Thanos, but we wanted to showcase that there’s a guy behind the guy behind the guy behind the guy. The emperor in Empire Strikes Back to Darth Vader. So we wanted to see a little bit more of him, see him and hear him for the first time. And just to get, which is one of my favorite shots in the whole movie, im leaning back in his throne and smirking, which he does on every cover of every comic, which is cool.”

Ultron was a big job to set apart from what has already happened in the movies: “The fear always was that there are a lot of robots. There are a lot of robots in the world. There are a lot of robots in movies. How do we make a different one? One, you have Joss Whedon write dialogue for him. And two, you have James Spader bring him to life. Through his body language and his verbal lines.”

What about the future movies?: “We’d like to stick to three years between Avengers movies like we did. So it will probably be three years between Avengers 2 and Avengers 3. I do like the idea of an existing franchise with The Winter Soldier, that we had this year, doing unexpected things with it, taking it to new unexpected places. And then the second movie of the year being an entirely new franchise. An entirely new storyline. Next year we’re doing the same thing with Age of Ultron and with Ant-Man. I see that could continue where it fits.”

With regards to the plethora of characters in the Marvel comic universe, how do they pick the movies that will spotlight them?: “It ultimately comes down to – what do we think would be cinematic? What do we think would be the kind of movie we want to make. With Guardians we very much wanted to, you’ve heard me say this before, go to the other side of the cosmic universe.

“There’s an amazing amount of outer space based storylines in our comics and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. But it’s about what we think the public would be interested in because it’s what we’re interested in as we spend two or three years working on a project.”

What of the rumours of actors looking to leave the franchises now that franchises are running out?: “Everyone signs for multiple pictures. How many pictures varies. The nine pictures, twelve pictures stuff is more rare. Usually a traditional three with some options for other appearances is more the norm. Everyone is locked up through Avengers 3.”

Will Ant-man tackle the abuse aspect that the comics did?: “Hank Pym did a lot of things in the comics and he’s a super cool character and the spin that we have on him, played by Michael Douglas, is even more unique, more different. I would say that some of that, some of the spirit of that plays into his temperament in the film, plays into his gruffness in the film. It certainly does not, in this movie, go to spouse abuse.”

What of  Doctor Strange? What can we expect to see?: “Doctor Strange it is a classic Marvel origin story, because he’s got one of the best origins ever and it’s our opportunity to take that left turn into the supernatural. Now what is the definition of supernatural? it varies. We love the idea of playing with alternate dimensions. Strange in the crazy acid trip way, traveling through other dimensions and realms, is something we think is very very cool. Playing with the perceptions of reality… we’re going to play a lot with the notion of that as an explanation of how the sorcerers do what they do.”

It’s hard to not get excited, isn’t it? Let us know your thoughts below, @Nerdfollowing or on Facebook