Ahead of its UK release next week the cast and crew of Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World were in London this past weekend to promote the arrival of the Phase Two sequel (our podcast coverage will be coming soon), with Marvel’s head honcho Kevin Feige fielding a tonne of questions on everything from The Avengers: Age of Ultron through to Phase Three and beyond…
“I think it will be more than a voice role – we’ll be capturing his face and his body to create a whole performance,” Feige told The Huffington Post, when asked about the casting of James Spader (The Blacklist) as the titular villain in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. “He’s a very unique and incredibly exciting and unpredictable actor. And Ultron in the comics is a robot, but what’s cool about him in the comics — and certainly how Joss Whedon is interpreting him for the movie — is that he is much more than just a robot. That he’s infused with much character. And I don’t want to say too much, but you can imagine James Spader will be very dynamic in his portrayal of this character… We did not hire James Spader to do a robot voice.”
Moving beyond Phase Two, and Movies.com grabbed a few words about future Marvel films, beginning with the long-rumoured Doctor Strange, which is expected to land during Phase Three: “Doc Strange, as I’ve been saying for years, is a movie I believe we should make — we’re just figuring out how to make it a great movie. It is in active development right now. Whether that’s one of the movies we announce for 2016 or 2017, we have to see. I think it’ll be the middle of next year before we announce officially what the post Ant-Man films will be.”
Asked whether the studio planned to diversify the MCU with a female superhero, Feige seemed to indicate that there were no plans at present:
“I don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re planning [note – huh?]. know we have numerous exciting female heroes, whether none of them are currently slated, some of them are in development — frankly, you can look at what Jane Foster does in [Thor: The Dark World], look at Pepper Potts literally saving the day and defeating the bad guy in Iron Man 3, and I’d say we already have great female heroes that are showcased and play major roles in our universe now. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as you will see, features Black Widow in her biggest role yet in any of our films. In terms of a solo standalone female hero, I’m not sure when that will be. We make two movies a year, we’ve planned through 2015 and we have some ideas of what we’re doing in 2016 and 2017, so we’ll see what happens.”
And finally, Bleeding Cool put the question to Feige about whether fans can expect the recently re-acquired Daredevil and The Punisher make their debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “We’re trying to figure out what to do with Daredevil now… Punisher could show up at one point. You know, once we get characters back into the Marvel fold we don’t want to do something right away, we want to do the smart thing at the smart time.”
What movies would you like to see as part of Marvel’s Phase Three? Let us know in the comments below….
Originally published October 21, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
