CraveOnline: So you’ve got this huge plan. You’ve got Phase Three spread out, you showed it to all of us at the end of last year, and then, “Oh right, we’re adding Spider-Man.” How subject to change is all of this, at the last minute? Or was that change only because you were able to get Spider-Man?
Kevin Feige: I would say those were fairly extraordinary circumstances. I would ay it’s always subject to change in that we’re not going to go forward with a movie if we don’t think it’s working. There have been a few shifts in the past. I think if you look back at the announcements we made the Monday after the first Iron Man opened, and we announced the movies, they shifted a little bit.
We waited a while for Ant-Man.
Ant-Man for sure. [At] the 2006 Comic-Con we were talking about Ant-Man, you’re right. But also I think the Thor date shifted by a year, things like that. So of course everything’s subject to change when it comes to that.
Spider-Man we knew about when we were doing that announcement in October. It could have gone either way, and Marvel as you well know doesn’t announce announce anything officially until it’s set in stone, so we went forward with that Plan A in October. With the Plan B being, if it were to happen with Sony, how it would all shift.
So this isn’t a last minute thing. This is going to be properly integrated into your plans for Phase Three.
We’ve been thinking about it as long as we’ve been thinking about Phase Three.
Do you think it’s necessary to retell Spider-Man’s origin when he’s already been rebooted so recently?
No. I do not think that.
Do you think we could possibly start doing away with origins altogether? I know some people are not happy with seeing origin stories all the time.
I don’t know what that means. I mean, that is very strange…
I agree.
In Spider-Man’s very specific case, where there have been two retellings of that origin in the last whatever it’s been – [thirteen] years – for us we are going to take it for granted that people know that, and the specifics. It will not be an origin story. But, with great power comes great responsibility. It is inherent to who his character is. But we want to reveal it in different ways and spend much more time focusing on this young high school kid in the MCU dealing with his powers.
Do you think you might approach it the way you did with Incredible Hulk, where the original Hulk film is used as a really vague backstory? Or is it going to be its own entity?
It’s own entity. There is a young kid running around New York City in a homemade version of the Spider-Man costume in the MCU, you just don’t know it yet. [Laughs.]
Do you feel like there’s anything that the other Spider-Man movies did really right that you kind of want to continue?
Yeah. Sure, I think they did a lot of things really, really right. In particular the look of Spider-Man, and the emotion of Spider-Man, and the women in his life. I think there are a lot of things they haven’t done, which is A) his interactions with other heroes in the universe, because that was not possible, and also exploring more the notion, as the comics did for many, many years, as Ultimate Spider-Man did for ten years, [of] a much younger version of Spider-Man than we’ve seen in the movies. They get him in and out of high school really fast.
It’s so weird.
Yeah, and also the notion that he is very, very funny and very, very witty when he’s in that costume, swinging around. Not as a standup comedian, obviously, but as almost his nervous energy, bothering the criminals with banter as much as with his powers. That’s something that I think we’re excited to explore.
When you say that you thought they did the look right before, is there a particular version that you liked? A particular look? Because the Sam Raimi ones look different than The Amazing Spider-Man 2…
Well, yeah, I mean look, I was more involved in the Raimi ones, and think they did a very good job. But that being said, we’ve already designed the costume, which is different than any of the ones that have come before. And yet ours is classic Spidey, as I think you’ll see.
