This year at the box office, superhero films like Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*,” “Captain America: Brave New World” and even the DC hit “Superman” have seen low turnout from moviegoers under 25 compared to films like “A Minecraft Movie.”
But Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige isn’t worried that the next generation is disinterested in superheroes. He just believes that every generation finds their passion for it in different ways. He’s seen that personally with his son, who wasn’t interested in what he did for a living until he played the hit video game “Marvel Rivals.”
In a conversation with trade reporters on the Disney backlot on Friday, Feige was asked about whether he thinks about how to keep interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe high among kids and teens who weren’t even born when “Iron Man” started the series back in 2008. The Oscar-nominated exec noted how growing up, his son only “feigned interest in a supportive way” in his work on superheroes like Spider-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Scarlet Witch.
But that changed with the release of “Marvel Rivals,” the NetEase hero shooter that has been played by more than 40 million people worldwide. The game features many of the heroes that have become stars of the MCU as well as others who have yet to make a big screen appearance like Squirrel Girl, Luna Snow and Jeff the Land Shark, the latter of whom got a shoutout from Feige as he talked about his son’s love of the game.
“Suddenly, he was asking me to tell him more about Hela. Tell him more about The Punisher and these other characters. And then he started seeking them out in the shows,” he said.
Feige used his son’s entry through a video game into the superhero world he has worked in for a quarter-century as an example of how Marvel, with its constantly growing web of multimedia, always finds something that gets different people across generations interested. Beyond “Marvel Rivals,” he noted the success of the Disney Junior preschool TV series “Spidey and his Amazing Friends,” which since 2021 has offered a toddler-friendly portrayal not just of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man but also Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy’s version of the webslinger.
That show premiered in August 2021, months before Marvel Studios and Sony released the $1.9 billion box office smash hit “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The fact that these characters are so malleable and can have different versions existing alongside each other in various forms of media is something that Feige sees as superheroes’ greatest strength.
“In 2021, on ‘Spidey and His Amazing Friends,’ the Green Goblin was making evil snowmen who were throwing snowballs at Spider-Man. At the same time, on the big screen, he’s killing Aunt Mae,” he quipped.
So just as 90s kids who saw the Fox Kids “Spider-Man” animated series were eventually led to Sam Raimi’s film trilogy, so too could Gen Z and Gen Alpha be led from “Marvel Rivals” and other video games and TV shows to “Avengers: Doomsday” and whatever films the MCU has to come in its third decade of existence.
That future includes the X-Men, which will be introduced in full in “Avengers: Doomsday” with Patrick Stewart and other stars of the 2000s films featuring the mutants. But Feige promises that there will be more than nostalgia, and that the X-Men will bring with them the thematic core that has made the Marvel mutants so timeless to generations of youth.
“You look at what the X-Men comics have always been, and they have been young, and they have been a place to tell stories about young people who feel different, and who feel other, and who feel like they don’t belong,” he said. “That’s the universal story of mutants.”
