Kevin Feige Shares His Geek and Marvel Origin Story at Comic-Con

July 2000 was the year I turned four and the year Kevin Feige first appeared at San Diego Comic-Con. At the time, he was just days away from officially joining Marvel, having just arrived in town with his friend, Geoff Johns.

Time flies. Kevin was a young producer at the time, ready to commit himself fully to a world of superheroes. I wonder if he knew the impact he would have all these years later. It’s been 25 years and it’s been along with a legacy of films.

Feige’s films have now grossed over $30 billion. In a panel in Hall H at Comic-Con with CB Cebulski, he opened up about his love for pop culture, comics, and the connection between Marvel Comics and movies. How they have sparked a new generation of fans and will continue to do so in the future.

After going to the movies throughout the ’80s, he fell in love with the art form. His obsession then expanded to collecting. “It’s a disease, a disease,” said Feige, who grew up in love with Star Wars toys, digging a Sarlacc pit in his yard to play in and later purchasing Star Trek Playmates toys. “Let’s make Playmates heard Star Trek action figure.” He joked later, “There’s no talk of that in Hall H.”

In 1995, when Kenner brought back Star Wars toys, Feige realized that this wasn’t just his childhood. It was going to be his whole life. I think most of us would love to bring our childhood dreams to life, just like Kevin Feige has done with the MCU and beyond. Who wouldn’t want the universe at their fingertips?

Before Feige worked exclusively for Marvel, he was already very familiar with the universe. He had worked on the 2000 X-Men film early in his career and would return six years later at Comic-Con with the newly formed Marvel Studios. He would continue to tease Iron Man, Captain America, and the potential for a shared universe.

“It was our secret weapon,” Keige said. “At that time, Fox had X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil. Sony had Spider-Man. Universal had Hulk, and a lot of the ‘Big’ characters had already been taken. So when we became our own studio… there was this idea that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

“We knew that wasn’t the case. Also, we could do something that none of the other studios could do, which is to do this interconnectivity. That would be our secret weapon and that would really be our goal, for the first time, to emulate the Marvel Universe from the comic book page to the big screen.” I bet you can guess what happened next.

Throughout the rest of the panel, they showed instances where Feige and his directors took direct imagery from the comics and placed it on the big screen. Captain America punching Hitler, or Thanos’ snap.

“It’s funny, CB,” Feige said, “I think it would be cool if Disney+ had a feature where you could click during the movie and see the footage that inspired it.” Which I think would be a feature a lot of us would love to have.

Now that Marvel Studios has some control over every single character in the universe, Feige talks about what would be too much, even for him. “The one that I still think is the darkest and I think if we ever get there we’ve probably gone too far is a character called Woodgod.” A comic book character from the 1970s, Woodgod is a human/animal hybrid who sought to create a society of creatures like himself.

The panel ends with Cebluski asking Feige about his hat: “My son saw it and said ‘is that Wal-Mart?'” Feige said, “No, it’s not Wal-Mart. This is a Lightning hat. And it’s the bullets that form the asterisk at the end of the logo.” The purpose of which we don’t yet know.

A preview of what’s to come next? We know that Marvel isn’t afraid to change the titles of their movies or shows. A great example would be The Falcon & The Winter Soldier when they changed it to Captain America and the Winter Soldier.

Having been in Hall H for the Lightning* announcement, I know I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us. I started this journey with Iron Manyears after its release, of course, but I’ve found myself going to every premiere since then and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.