Marvel has been signaling pretty strongly that fans shouldn’t hold hope for the cast of Agents of SHIELD to appear in the movieverse anytime soon—but now head studio honcho Kevin Feige is signaling the same for the company’s Netflix heroes. At least, however, he offers a solid explanation as to why they’re not showing up.
Speaking to Collider recently, Feige discussed the issue of the ever-increasing chasm between the realm of Marvel’s TV output and its movies, specifically the company’s quartet of shows on Netflix. While he didn’t outright deny the heroes would ever appear in the films (although he did seemingly rule out appearances in Avengers: Infinity War at the very least), Feige offered a somewhat more compelling reason than the ones Marvel producers have offered in the past:
I think it’s extremely impressive what Netflix has done and it will be the same answer I always give, which is, “It all depends on timing.” It all depends on how to do it because I don’t think what anybody wants to do is have such important characters show up for one second. Black Panther and Spider-Man to me are the high bar in Civil War of how you can bring in new characters into something. Vision and Ultron, Wanda and Pietro in Ultron. And it takes a lot of screentime, and it takes a lot of work. Infinity War has a lot of people in it already. So it just depends on how we could figure it out.
It makes a lot of sense, even if it’s not exactly what people want to hear. If Marvel thinks that the way to introduce these heroes in a movie is to give the level of screentime and participation the likes of Spider-Man or Black Panther got in Civil War—already a pretty character-stuffed movie—then the thought of trying to introduce Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and then Iron Fist at the same time on top of all the other movie characters could be very unwieldy.
But at least Feige sounds like there’s a possibility of these sort of things happening in the future—it might just be a good while longer than most fans really want for it happen. Still, hope springs eternal and all that.
[Collider via Comic Book Movie]
DISCUSSION
“because I don’t think what anybody wants to do is have such important characters show up for one second.”
No, that’s actually totally fine by me. I like tiny easter eggs - say, if Thanos starts to rain minions onto NYC, a quick montage action sequence of The Defenders kicking some ass and rescuing civilians. Then have the Bus hovering overhead and Coulson barking out a few orders to his team on the ground. 3 min tops, and fanboys can rejoice.