Kevin Feige Contemplated Leaving Marvel Studios Before Recent Restructuring

What would Marvel Studios look like without Kevin Feige as its president? We'll find out someday when he ultimately decides to move on, but we almost entered that situation way sooner than fans would have liked. According to THR, Feige "contemplated leaving" the studio partly over budget disagreements regarding Captain America: Civil War, in which Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter and the creative committee both wanted Feige to "scale it down."

You'd think Feige would have earned some more trust from those around him by now. The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is his brainchild, and he's led the studio to become an industry powerhouse and reshaped the way studios are thinking about storytelling in films. Feige wasn't happy with the suggestions, so Disney CEO Bob Iger changed things to where Feige will no longer report to Perlmutter at all, and also essentially ended the creative committee's influence over the film side of the equation. (It will apparently stay in existence for Marvel TV and other properties still overseen by Perlmutter.)

It's kind of crazy to think that the studio nearly lost its most important person over something like budget issues, especially for a movie like Captain America: Civil War, which is almost certainly going to do better numbers than Ant-Man and maybe even top Avengers: Age of Ultron (which the company considers a failure, despite grossing over a billion dollars).