Before Marvel, Kevin Feige Worked On A Classic Tom Hanks Rom-Com

Kevin Feige might be weathering a protracted storm as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to struggle in the wake of so-called superhero fatigue, but there's no denying the man's influence on the movie industry. The MCU has thus far raked in more than $30 billion at the box office, making it the most lucrative franchise in cinematic history and Feige the highest-grossing film producer of all time. He is one of the most well-known and successful figures in Hollywood, an uncharacteristically public-facing executive whose consistent boosterism of his own franchise has helped it become the behemoth it is today.

But even as monolithic a figure as Kevin Feige had to start somewhere, and in his case that "somewhere" was as a humble movie fan who would, as he revealed to Variety, keep a journal where he'd write down every movie that he saw, where he saw it, and how many times. "I'd record what the sound system was like. It was all very nerdy," he told the outlet. Once he was accepted to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in the early '90s, he started to turn his love of movies into a career. After graduating in 1995 he landed an internship with producer Lauren Shuler Donner and was quickly taken on as her assistant.

It was after this that Feige found himself working on some well-known '90s films long before he became the comic book movie maestro he is today. One of those movies just so happened to be arguably the most '90s movie ever: "You've Got Mail."

Kevin Feige's first credit was as an assistant to Lauren Shuler Donner on the 1997 disaster movie "Volcano," which starred Tommy Lee Jones and the late Anne Heche. That might not have been anything compared to what Feige would go on to do in the industry but for someone who'd grown up with as big a love for movies as he did, it must have felt like he was finally doing what he'd always wanted.

The following year he gained his next credit, once again as assistant to Donner on the 1998 romantic comedy "You've Got Mail." Directed by Nora Ephron, who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister, Delia, the film reunited Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, who had previously starred together in 1990's "Joe Versus the Volcano" and Ephron's seminal rom-com "Sleepless in Seattle (1993). With "You've Got Mail," the writer/director once again managed to capture the magic that made her previous Hanks-Ryan effort so memorable, crafting a charming love story set in New York's Upper West Side. Hanks' Joe Fox, the head of a major bookstore chain, and Ryan's Kathleen Kelly, an independent bookstore owner, are bitter business rivals but also happen to unknowingly become romantically involved via that most '90s of social spaces, an online chatroom. The result is one of the best feel-good movies and one of the best Meg Ryan films ever made. "You've Got Mail" is also dated in the most fun way possible, festooned as it is with dial-up logins, AOL emails, and AIM sessions.

What most fans of the film probably didn't realize, however, is that when we see Ryan and Hanks using their all-important laptops to forge an internet romance, they were taught to do so by Kevin Feige himself.

Lauren Shuler Donner was a producer on "You've Got Mail," and put her then-assistant Kevin Feige to good use on the project. The young Feige was told to teach Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, and Nora Ephron how to use computers and send emails, since none of them at the time were all that familiar with what was still an emerging technology. So, in a way, one classic Ryan and Hanks love story couldn't have been told without Kevin Feige.

After "You've Got Mail," Donner was hired to produce the 2000 "X-Men" movie and this time Feige was given a little more to do than teach movie stars how to convincingly work a laptop. As Donner told the New York Time, "As a walking encyclopedia of Marvel, he was really indispensable in those early days." Feige was a big comic book fan and his contributions to making "X-Men" comic-book accurate earned him an associate producer credit on the movie. After that, Feige went on to executive produce several other Marvel movies prior to the launch of Marvel Studios, working on Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy and the Jennifer Garner-led "Elektra." Once the first MCU movie, "Iron Man," debuted in 2008 and changed Hollywood forever, the rest became history.

Now, Feige claims to know what went wrong with the MCU after "Avengers: Endgame" but we've also seen Marvel Studios churn out safe, forgettable rehashes like "Captain America: Brave New World" long after the company's recent woes began. If the man's proven anything over his long career, however, it's that he possesses a remarkable resilience, so surely his biggest contribution to cinema yet (that is the MCU, not teaching Tom Hanks how to chat up Meg Ryan via dial-up) will prove similarly hardy in time.