A report from The Nation, titled The Rise and Fall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, reads like a damning indictment of Marvel head Kevin Feige’s obsessive nature in controlling every part of the creative process, to the point where directors are barely in control of directing these movies, and that Feige dictates the shots.
Feige’s innovation has been to wrest control of the creative process from the directors and writers, running movie production from the C-suite down […] Over the course of the past 15 years, Feige has drained every bit of fun from the MCU, obsessing over interconnections, continuity, and IP Easter eggs instead of allowing his filmmakers to embrace their idiosyncrasies.
Originally, Feige was more favorable to directors getting the freedom they needed to make their movie. In 2008, Jon Favreau directed “Iron Man,” which kickstarted the MCU, with a more lenient Feige letting Favreau use improv and spur-of-the-moment creative instinct to realize his full vision.
However, as the MCU became bigger, so did Feige’s ego. He had a grand plan, to interconnect all of the Marvel movies into this multi-versed vision he had created in his head.
Feige began to drift away from hiring strong-willed directors whose vision for a particular film might conflict with his grand plan
The report goes on to describe a creative process, taken over by Feige, which has “directors, writers, and visual effects artists not really figuring into the calculus.”
More interesting is the backstory of how Edgar Wright — “a young, imaginative filmmaker with a distinctive voice” — hopped onboard “Ant Man” without realizing the creative restrictions that Feige was about to impose on him.
Wright wrote a script for “Ant Man” in 2011, and then … the “Marvel method” was in full effect. He soon realized what he had signed up for.
His enthusiasm waned once he started getting notes from not just Feige but also Joss Whedon (who was serving as czar for all Avengers-related IP) and a board of toy and comic book executives at Marvel’s main office in New York.
At some point, one of Marvel’s in-house writers did a pass on Wright’s script that left the director “horrified.” An enormous amount of dialogue had been altered, and references to the wider MCU had been snuck in.” A week later, as principal photography was about to begin, Wright exited the film, replaced with Peyton Reed, best known for the cheerleader comedy “Bring it On.”
The report goes on to describe Marvel’s control of filmmakers as one that brings in all these “journeyman directors who would do what the studio wanted, or these people who they could, frankly, bully.”
This aligns well with what former Marvel exec, Victoria Alonso, had said back in March 2023. It had been reported that Alonso berated an unnamed Marvel director on-set, saying that “they don't direct the movies, we direct the movies.' Meaning, the filmmakers we hire don't have creative control over the look or feel of the films.
“The Marvels” director Nia Da Costa echoed Alonso’s assertions by implying that the movie was never really in her control and that it was very much “a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie. So, I think you have to live in that reality.”
If anything, what a director actually does on the set of a Marvel movie is give directions to various crews, units, and cinematographers to do their jobs. It's a “collaborative” effort, but the director doesn’t really “direct” in the purest sense of the term. He or she just oversees, adheres to Feige’s demands and hopes for the best.