Kevin Feige Talks ‘Blade’ Delays, the MCU and More

The executive revealed that the company is doubling down on fewer movies and shows, his tenure at Marvel and whether we’ll see cameo actors any time soon.

Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige at Disney's 2024 CinemaCon Presentation. Photo: Disney.

Preview:

Kevin Feige has given a wide-ranging interview about the state of Marvel.
He touched on the delays with ‘Blade’.
He also admitted that recent disappointments necessitated a change in thinking.

With the studio’s latest giant release –– and one of its biggest gambles in years on the way via ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’, Marvel boss Kevin Feige took the opportunity to address some of the topics that have been floating around, including recent underperforming movies and TV series under the Marvel Cinematic Universe, his own future (spoiler alert: he aims to stick around!) and more.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

"Welcome to the family."

PG-131 hr 55 minJul 25th, 2025

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Against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, Marvel's First Family is forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their... Read the Plot

Among the other subjects? The long-gestating and troubled development of a new ‘Blade’ movie, and his team’s new seven-year plan for new movies and shows and whether we’ll see actors from end credits cameos in the future.

What’s happening with ‘Blade’?

(Left) Mahershala Ali attends the 89th Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood & Highland Center on February 26, 2017 in Hollywood, California. Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images. (Right) Marvel Studios' 'Blade.'

Blade, the Daywalking half-human-half-vampire character most famously played by Wesley Snipes, was announced for a reboot back at 2019’s San Diego Comic-Con. Since then, it has been a drawn-out log of multiple script drafts, directors coming and going, different time periods considered and, all through it, Oscar winner Mahershala Ali staying attached to the lead role.

Here’s what Feige had to say about it:

“You can start and have a good script and make it a great script through production, but we didn’t feel confident we could do that on 'Blade'. We didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us. we landed on modern day and that’s what we’re focusing on. We didn’t want to put a leather outfit on Mahershala and have him start killing vampires.”

Feige also joked that Ryan Coogler –– who is developing a third ‘Black Panther’ outing for the company –– added to the delay by utilizing some of the costumes the company had created for a Prohibition-era take on the story in his own recent hit, ‘Sinners’.

Feige on movies and shows feeling like homework

(L to R) Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and John Walker (Wyatt Russell) in Marvel Studios' 'Thunderbolts*'. Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. © 2024 Marvel.

The executive also touched on complaints that the sheer output and deepened connectivity between the Disney+ MCU series and the big screen outings were feeling like homework and turning off viewers who hadn’t seen them, which in turn hurt the box office revenues of ‘The Marvels’ and ‘Thunderbolts*’:

“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.”

Going forward, we can expect to see some of the actors (such as 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness' Charlize Theron) who cameoed in end credits stings, but not everyone, and not right now. Feige cited the example of Tim Blake Nelson, who had to wait 17 years for his ‘Incredible Hulk’ character, Samuel Sterns, to return in this year’s ‘Captain America: Brave New World’.

According to Feige, the company has a seven-year plan to take it up to 2032, admitting that while he most much of it will stay on track, projects are on magnets on a board in a conference room so they can move around as necessary.

Feige on the Kang/Doom issue

Marvel Studios' 'Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.'

Perhaps the biggest topic Feige had to address was how Jonathan Majors’ Kang was ramped up as the future big bad, only to drop away (around the same time the actor was accused of assault) in favor of the return of Robert Downey Jr. to the MCU, this time as Dr. Doom.

His answer wasn’t entirely convincing, but he took a stab at explaining the change:

“We had started even before what had happened to the actor happened, we had started to realize that Kang wasn’t big enough, wasn’t Thanos, and that there was only one character that could be that, because he was that in the comics for decades and decades. Because of the Fox acquisition, we finally had it, and it was Dr. Doom. So we had started talking about Dr. Doom even before we officially pivoted from Kang. And in fact, I had started talking with Robert [Downey Jr.] about this audacious idea before ‘Ant-Man 3’ even came out. It was a long plan that we had, to take one of our greatest characters and utilize one of our greatest actors.”