For fans of Guardians of the Galaxy who worried we’d have to dust off our #WheresGamora hashtag, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige is here to assuage our fears. Years of blowback from irate fans who could find neither solo Gamora and Black Widow merchandise nor see them represented in swag showcasing their respective superhero teams put Marvel on notice. On the set of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 last year, Feige confirmed to Slashfilm that the Great Female Superhero Toy Drought™ is officially over.
Black Widow [and] Gamora [were all over the mock-up merchandise]. What [filmmakers] don’t see is how much of it is in any given store. How easy is one piece of merchandise to find versus another piece of merchandise. So, we see the stuff and we go, oh great, these are all our characters, they’re all great represented, they’re all going to be sold, and then we find out, oh, you can’t find this, you can’t find that, or there’s lunch boxes or a backpack where a certain character is not on it, and I think the outrage was great, because that’s not going to happen anymore.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the behind-the-scenes politics of Marvel Studios won’t be surprised by this confirmation. Feige took over Marvel’s movie side back in August of 2015 during what some might call a coup. The shake-up took Marvel’s film decisions out of the hands of longtime Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter. Considering Perlmutter was responsible for the gender change of the villain Iron Man 3, had a hand in the lack of Black Widow merchandise, and allegedly told Disney executive Andy Mooney not to worry about recasting Colonel Jim Rhodes in Iron Man 2 because no one would notice since black people all “look the same,” let’s just say many Marvel fans have been over the moon that Perlmutter no longer has creative control over the most lucrative and highly-visible portion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.