Kevin Feige: Why the MCU is Expanding to 3 Movies a Year

It's been common for Marvel Studios to pump out two movies in a year, but moving forward, they are now looking to expand to giving us a total of three. Marvel head Kevin Feige talks about why they made the move, and it's all for telling more stories and exploring obscurer characters.

Talking to CinemaBlend, Feige explains:

"It's one of the reasons we've expanded to three films a year, is so that we could do the sequels to films that people have responded to -- because we love to make continuing stories with characters people have responded to -- but also keep doing the stuff that nobody's ever heard of, and people go, 'Why are you doing that?' That's fun. And that's what Phase One was built on, Phase Two was built on, Phase Three was built on, is having that... Whenever we announce the next year, two years, three years, five years, whatever we're going to announce, there will be plenty of those that, maybe people in the know like yourself will know what they are, but the world at large will go, 'What is it? Why are they doing that?' That's exciting, for sure.

It's amazing how so many low-key characters have become major faces of the franchise. Back in 2008, only the major comic fans knew who Iron Man was, but now the character is almost as big as Superman. Don't even get me started on the Guardians of the Galaxy.

When it comes to characters that haven't been introduced before, Feige says it all falls down to scheduling the films. He explains:

"When you've got, what is it now, six, seven separate franchises? It's part of the scheduling process. Sometimes when people ask, 'What about this character, what about that character?' I go, 'Well, it's scheduling.' And they go, 'What's he talking about?' Scheduling. How many years between movies can you have? You know, [Thor:] Ragnarok was four years. There's four years between, right? He had an appearance in between there. So that seems to be maybe okay - sometimes, though, you want it to be less. Sometimes it can be more."

While I'm sure a lot of people would be up for more Marvel movies, I don't know how a year will look with three Marvel films coming out simultaneously with DC's superhero movies. With a lot of fans already expressing franchise fatigue with comic book films, hopefully Marvel Studios can shake up the formula enough to keep the franchise fresh for another ten years.

For now, the next MCU film, Ant-Man and the Wasp, comes out July 5.

See Also: Marvel Studios Will Still Make A Sequel To Doctor Strange