Bloomberg Business Week Article Gives Hints To Marvel Studios’ Future

It’s not often that you find film scoop and spoilers from a financial magazine, but that is what you get from Bloomberg Business Week’s profile on Marvel Studios in their latest issue. Yes, you do get facts and figures illustrating how Marvel’s film arm benefited the comic book company financially from the Devin Leonard article, but you also get some information on the what the future of their film franchises.

For instance:

• Marvel has a slate for their film output mapped out until 2028: Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what characters will be hitting the big screen between now and 2028. I’m sure that there are some films penciled in here and there, but I think that what they are talking about is merely a release framework. And, even if they did have characters inked in up to 2028, I wouldn’t count anything being cast in stone. Who knows if comic book films will still be popular in 14 years?
• There is a mystery villain in Guardians of the Galaxy: As an example of Kevin Feige’s hands-on approach to the Marvel films, the article describes a conversation between Feige and Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn about a certain scene from the film. The scene involves “an imposing-looking villain any serious comic book fan would recognize instantly” who ” sits on a rocket-powered throne.” Feige swears Leonard to secrecy, stating the reveal would be a big spoiler. However, this does not stop Leonard from suggesting that it might be Dr. Doom (whose rights are owned by Fox, not Marvel, so it can’t be him), MODOK (whose trippy visual appearance would fit in with the alien world of outer space, but would be too big of a break from his comic book origin), and Odin (which, if you’ve seen the Thor: The Dark World, is not that much of a stretch). Of course, the much more likely candidate is Thanos, a character everyone suspected would be in the film anyway.
• The characters in Guardians of the Galaxy might be spun off into their own movies: This might be a case of putting the cart before the horse, as GotG is Marvel’s riskiest venture to date and its success is anything but guaranteed. But I think it would be at the very least prudent to put a Rocket Raccoon film into early development.
• There might be more characters introduced in The Avengers: Age of Ultron than we have been told, and they might be getting films too: Leonard relates a meeting of Disney head honchos Bob Iger and Alan Horn with the Marvel brain trust about characters being introduced  in the Avengers sequel who might be good candidates for their own film. Iger refuses to name the characters. Now, by now we know that Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Vision have already been named as being in the film. Could this mean there could be more Avengers added to the roll call? Well, that depends on when the leg work for the article was done. James Gunn is doing preliminary work on a scene from GotG in the article. Now, if this is a scene that is going to be tacked on the already finished film, then the spinoff character(s) might be someone new, like the oft rumored Black Panther or Ms. Marvel. If Leonard did the legwork while GotG was in preproduction, I don’t believe that Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch or the Vision were announced at that time, so Iger could be referring to them.