Kevin Feige Says Marvel Was Making ‘Too Much’

Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige now concedes what most Marvel fans have felt for a while: The company was making too many hours of film and television.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, gave a three-word response when it was noted that the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Avengers: Endgame consisted of around 50 hours of stories, while the six years since have ballooned to 127 hours of film and television programming.

“That’s too much,” Feige said.

Feige described the recent Marvel output as a time of “experimentation, evolution” and “expansion.” And he did mention a few projects that didn’t quite connect, even if they were made with good intentions on the part of the company.

It was a big company push, and it doesn’t take too much to push us to go, ‘People have been asking for Ms. Marvel for years, and now we can do it? Do it! Oscar Isaac wants to be Moon Knight? Do it!’ So there was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it’d be fun to bring these to life.

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Feige also offered his opinion on why a movie like Thunderbolts*, which got generally very good reviews (including from this very website), struggled at the box office, grossing just $382 million at the worldwide box office, one of the very lowest totals in the history of the NYU.

“It’s that expansion that I think led people to say, ‘Do I have to see all of these? It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?’” Feige theorized, adding, “Some of them were still feeling the residual effects of that notion of, ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is … I think if you actually saw the movie, that wouldn’t be the case, and we make the movie so that’s not the case. But I think we still have to make sure the audience understands that.”

Marvel has already cut back on their output slightly. Although they have 3 big-screen movies in 2025, they will have only two in 2026, and they currently only have one film announced for 2027. They have already released two series on Disney+ this year — Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart — and they do have three more planned for the second half of the year (Eyes of Wakanda, Marvel Zombies, and Wonder Man). So they’re not scaling back that much, at least not yet.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in theaters next Friday.