Kevin Feige Talks 'Wonder Man' For The First Time, 'The Fantastic Four' Setting
Marvel has launched a podcast, so of course they have the biggest guy at the company as first guest
Marvel has officially launched a podcast! And not just any podcast, but The Official Marvel Podcast. Who else would they have as their first guest but the head honcho, Marvel Studios President and Marvel Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige. For the first time, he broke the ice on a long-reported but not formally announced series and confirmed long-speculated details about the upcoming The Fantastic Four movie as it heads into production.
Hallelujah, Wonder Man has finally been acknowledged. It is co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, who serves as showrunner, and starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Demetrius Grosse, Ben Kingsley, reprising his role as Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3 and reunites him with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Cretton, and reportedly Ed Harris, Josh Gad, and Lauren Glazier. The series’s lack of official announcement meant the general public still has no idea how exactly Simon Williams’s story has been shaped for the MCU, which is a post-Tony Stark world readying to introduce him, a character whose comics background involves Tony so heavily. Feige positioned the series as different from anything we’ve seen before, saying “We have a show coming up that we’ve talked very little about called Wonder Man, that I won’t talk about much today either except to say it’s extremely different. It’s very exciting to be a part of a company of 25 years or more, and a company that’s been around for 85 years, nestled [within] the Walt Disney Company, that’s been around for 100 years, and still being able to try new things, to take characters and stories to new places. That’s what’s exciting to me.”
This is definitely a watershed moment for the series and certainly means that the formal announcement will come in the next couple of months. Whether the rumors that the Hall H presentation at San Diego Comic-Con will be movie-focused actually comes true or not, it’ll still have the Studio Showcase during D23 in August, which by the same token is where the TV focus is rumored to be.
Feige was also asked about The Fantastic Four, which he confirmed begins filming on July 29, just under a year until its July 25, 2025 release. It stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, and a supporting cast that includes Ralph Ineson as the villainous Galactus, Julia Garner, Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich and Natasha Lyonne. Very directly, the question pertained to whether the film took place in the 1960s. "Yes, yes, very much so," Feige said, taking it a step further by confirming that something was up in the released art. "It is a period, and there was another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air, writing a four in the skies.” He then commended “smart observations” of the eagle-eyed fans that noticed the skyline/cityscape wouldn’t match that of New York now or then, hinting at some sort of alternate Earth or timeline, but he was otherwise coy.
His excitement to fully utilize the characters after several teases still shone through however, saying "I am incredibly excited for what we're doing with The Fantastic Four right now, and what Matt Shakman, our director who did WandaVision for us, is working on. He's already moved to London… I'm extremely excited by it because I think those characters are mainstays, are legendary pillars of the Marvel universe that we've never got to play with or explore in any significant way, apart from Multiverse of Madness and a few fun teases before. In the way that we're doing it in that film."
The full podcast premiere episode can be watched below from YouTube and is presumably available wherever else podcasts are.
Sources: IGN, What’s On Disney Plus
In the late 1930s, there was a competitor of Superman called Wonder Man that didn't last long because DC sued the publisher for infringing on the Superman copyright. We're probably not talking about that one, but I wanted you to know that it is an old, used name.