Total Film has a report from CineEurope in Barcelona, during which Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige screened some new footage from “Guardians of the Galaxy” and answered questions about the current potential of a possible “Guardians” franchise, the rest of Marvel's announced studio slate — including “Ant-Man” and “Doctor Strange” — as well as Thanos, and much more. According to Feige, Thanos is the “biggest piece of connective tissue that will eventually lead us back into 'Avengers' films in the future” — so there are obviously big plans for the character coming down the line.
“In particular, there's a villain in this film, that comic fans know as Thanos, that moviegoers will begin to learn more and more about in the coming years,” said Feige. “He appeared at the very end of the first 'Avengers' film, when he turned into camera and smirked, and we realized he was the person behind the alien army that Loki teamed up with to terrorize New York City, and that the Avengers had to fight.”
In terms of the creative shift for “Ant-Man” that began with the exit of longtime writer/director Edgar Wright, Feige very quickly discussed the involvement of incoming director Peyton Reed and writer Adam McKay. “Edgar Wright, who I've known for many years, who wrote the draft with Joe Cornish – much of the movie will still be based very much on that draft and the DNA of what Edgar has created up to this point, but Peyton Reed has stepped in [to direct],” Feige said. “Adam McKay, a very good writer is reworking parts of the script – not the entirety of the script, but some of it – and it's going to, we believe, come to life in the best version of 'Ant-Man' that we could possibly make. Again Ant-Man is a very important character for us. We like that people don't necessarily know what it is, we like that it sounds sort of strange when you first hear the notion of Ant-Man, or a hero that can shrink, but he's a very key Marvel character: he's a key Avenger.”
Also on Marvel Studios' upcoming slate is “Doctor Strange,” a film that Feige called “very, very important” and that is slated to start production in 2015. “Not just because it's an amazing character study, and a journey of a man who's gone from this very arrogant surgeon to somebody who is quite zen and literally keeps all of reality together on a daily basis, but it also is going to open up a whole other side of storytelling for our movies,” Feige said. “So we're about to hire a writer to redo a draft, and we think we'll be casting probably in the next month or two, and announcing an actor, and then we get into production in the spring of next year.”