There are four Marvel movies confirmed and scheduled, starting with Iron Man 3 on May 3, 2013, followed six months later by Thor 2 on November 15 and then Captain America Sequel, just announced for April 4, 2014, five months after that. The fourth project is scheduled for May 16, 2014, but the title of that film has not been announced yet.
Since the other movies led up to The Avengers, we wondered how much of these three upcoming movies might lead up to the inevitable sequel to The Avengers.
“There will be various levels of seeds and Easter eggs,” Marvel Studios President of Production Kevin Feige told us in an exclusive interview last week. “The mandate is always to make the best movie possible regardless of where we’re heading or what fun little Easter eggs we want to do. The movies have to work in and of themselves, so ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Thor’ will be more individualized and more focused just on their stories. ‘Captain America’ will be a pure Steve Rogers story, but have more in common with the backdrop of ‘Avengers.'”
To us, this last part seemed to imply that we’d more than likely be seeing Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. play a part in the Cap sequel and while Feige wouldn’t confirm this, he did hint about where each of the main three Avengers might be heading in their movies.
“Tony Stark can go home to Malibu and deal with his own circle of friends and his own sort of military industrial complex that the world of Stark Industries inhabits. Thor as you will see initially leaves the planet and goes back to Asgard and has to deal with the Nine Realms, and to reconnect with Jane Foster. Cap is the only one that can’t go home again. His home is gone, and how he deals with the modern era will be the crux of that movie.”
We also were curious about the decision to hire Shane Black, best known for his screenwriting in Hollywood, particularly the “Lethal Weapon” series, to direct Iron Man 3, considering the fact he only directed one previous movie, the action-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which played a part in Robert Downey Jr.’s casting as Tony Stark.
Was the experience with a writer/director like Joss Whedon on The Avengers one that got Feige thinking about working with more hyphenated filmmakers?
Feige replied, “I wouldn’t say that was, ‘Hey, Josh did a great job, let’s find another writer/director.’ It wasn’t that. We said, ‘Hey, who can bring a new spark to Tony Stark?’ Shane Black has been doing that his whole career, taking the tropes of whether it’s a noir picture in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,’ of defining and then redefining the action genre in the ’80s and ’90s and redefining the buddy cop genre, obviously with ‘Lethal Weapon.’ That’s what he’s done and clearly helping to bring back Robert Downey Jr–‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ was a big influence for us in helping make our decision to hire Robert in the first place.
“So it’s incredibly exciting for us. It’s been over a year now that Shane’s been working on the movie with his co-writer Drew Pearce, and it’s very exciting what’s going to be happening to Tony Stark in about five weeks.”
Look for the rest of our interview with Kevin, talking more specifically about Marvel’s The Avengers, sometime in the next few weeks before it opens on May 4.
