Kevin Feige On Marvel's Future, Captain Marvel, And Joss Whedon Leaving 'The Avengers'

It's that time again: the Marvel publicity machine has kicked into full gear as the Avengers: Age of Ultron press tour gets underway, and that means that producer Kevin Feige is out there giving an MCU update, answering questions about all aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Feige is often guarded about giving out real information, but there are still a great many comments to parse, with respect to the future of the MCU, the directorial shift in Avengers movies (with bonus Joss Whedon comments), and upcoming characters such as Captain Marvel and, of course, Spider-Man.

First up, Badass Digest asked Feige about how the deal with Spider-Man will play out. What happens if Marvel only has access to the Spidey license for a short period of time? Will he be part of the MCU and then just vanish? Seems like there are a few years before that will be a potential problem. As Feige says,

For as forward thinking as we always try to be, there's only so far you can tend to think, and our plan is fairly solid for those four or five years. ... So much of the anxiety at Marvel has been 'Who do we have contracts with, who is still involved'? You want to plot out all these years of imagination based on amazing comics, but you need real people to make time in their lives to do [them], and to make career decisions to do it. That has been the hardest thing to manage... but for the first time, that's all settled. It's all settled through [2019]. It's all set. And we're able to focus now just on [telling stories]. It's everything we announced last October, and we've added your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to the mix... and it's all set.

Granted, four to five years is, at this point, enough to do maybe two movies if they race through the process.

And it's not all set. Feige was asked about Captain Marvel, and more specifically about rumors that the character might have appeared in Age of Ultron. (She doesn't.) Turns out the character isn't cast yet. Feige told MTV,

She was in an early version of the script, yes. We didn't want to introduce her as this fully-formed hero, flying in a costume, before you got to know who she was, or how she came to be. ... In terms of finding the actress, it's still very early days. It's about finding writers right now, and we're very close.

Entertainment Weekly, meanwhile, talked to Joss Whedon and Feige, and asked Whedon about passing on directing Avengers: Infinity War parts 1 and 2. He said,

Every movie I have ever made has been an ensemble piece of increasingly enormous proportions. That many balls in the air, it's only going to get bigger with Infinity War. I'm not going to be able to give it what I would need to. It's a young man's game.

To keep things on topic, Feige joked with Whedon with a little Godfather humor, saying "Just when you think you're out, you get pulled back in." Don't expect that to happen here, however. Feige retorted, "that's the other reason I'm not making a third one."

Finally, when Feige does the rounds like this there's always talk about an end point for one of Marvel's newest heroes: Kevin Feige. Collider asked the producer about his Marvel contract, which we've known would be ending right around the time Phase Three concludes with the release of The Inhumans in July 2019. And, yeah, Feige's current contract is up in 2018. What will he do after that? We don't know, though staying with Marvel isn't out of the question.