Why do people love Kevin Feige so much?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Kevin Feige is soft-spoken, humble, generally happy looking in public. Those Sony hacks confirmed that many of the stuff which Marvel fans wanted and complained about, he wanted and complained about too, so he became confirmed as "their guy". Feige also rebelled against Isaac Perlmutter, a type-A old-school Alpha who dominates every conversation, and he won. So there's a vicarious connect there with fans. Feige gets to be "the man" but not "the Man" you know. At the same time it's natural for fans to personify their liking for a franchise in a single person and creator. They like to imagine one guy behind the things they like, so for the MCU it's Feige, in the same way that in the comics it used to be Stan Lee...and say what you want, Feige hasn't used some fancy Marvel Method chicanery to claim that he directed the movies without actually doing the work real directors do.

I personally do think Feige-worship is silly and a little ignorant in some cases (like with the Sony Spider-Man films where people assume that Feige was behind everything good and Sony was behind everything bad). More harmful is the fact that, I think Kevin Feige's fame and hagiography has distorted a lot of people's idea of being a good movie producer actually is becasue I don't know if it can be said that Feige really is a great movie producer.

In his career, he's never really produced real non-IP films. He's never done what real producers had to do (like Amy Pascal, or even Tom Rothman at Sony) that is pick an unknown project and little known director, shepherd it with funding from obscure places and then get it made and distributed well. That's what actually great movie producers -- whether it's Robert Evans, Roger Corman had to do. Jason Blum, of Blumhouse Productions...that guy is a real movie producer. He's made horror as a viable profitable genre, launched the careers of excellent film-makers, and produced films like Jordan Peele's Us which is way better than any Marvel movie. A lot of people dislike Tom Rothman but Tom Rothman early in his career funded independents like Jim Jarmusch and others. He's done time in the trenches so to speak.

Feige has been a company man at Marvel's studio productions. He worked as an intern for Lauren Schuler Donner, who produced the Fox X-Men movies, then got promoted to work in various roles on Marvel productions until getting a senior role steadily after that. I think his career is more about dedication, loyalty, and committment rather than real innovation. The decision to create the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't taken by him or made by him, and it wasn't his call. That was David Maisel who did that, he was the one who came up with the idea and pitched it to Isaac Perlmutter who agreed on it. So with Feige, there's capacity, there's competence, but there's also a lot of being in the right place at the right time.