Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has stated that his plans for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will mix things up with their roster of heroes. In his future plans, Feige has revealed that the number of female superheroes will soon outnumber the male superheroes, which will be an enormous change, most likely for the better.
One of the biggest complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is their lack of diversity. After 10 years, Marvel has still not put out a single female led solo movie. Their first female led movie will be Captain Marvel, which won't release until next year. Ant-Man and the Wasp releases next week, which will co-star a female superhero, but even that is not enough to forgive the ten years of male dominance in their franchise. It's absolutely unrealistic to imagine that only a spare few of the superheroes in the Marvel universe are men, considering that men only take up half of the population.
Fortunately, Kevin Feige is hoping to change this, most likely starting in Phase 4 of the MCU. In an interview with Screen Rant, Feige discussed his plans to bring even more female superheroes into the picture. Here is what he had to say.
"But, as the plan goes forward I think frankly we'll be ... you know, eventually I think we're going to reach a time where it's not just ... listen, it would be amazing to see all of our female characters the way we have seen ... most, never all male, but primarily male. I think we're getting to the point soon where we have so many great female characters that those are just our heroes as opposed to when are they all female, all male. It's just the Marvel heroes, more than half of which will be women."
In frankness, this decision may have been inspired by the incredible success of Wonder Woman last year. Up until then, most female led superheroes did not fare well at the box office, such as Elektra and Catwoman. However, Wonder Woman proved that if a female led superhero movie is actually good, audiences will still go to see it.
In addition to Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios is also planning a Black Widow solo movie that will follow Natasha Romanoff finally in her own solo adventure, which is predicted to be an origin story. Hopefully, there will be a number of more female led superhero movies coming from Marvel Studios in the near future, showing more demographics outside of white males. Characters like Kamala Khan, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, and Jane Foster's Thor are all great characters in the comics, so it would be a breath of fresh air to see them finally receive their own movies.
While not everyone may see diversity in superhero movies as a good thing, this announcement by Kevin Feige to Screen Rant is indeed great news. It's important to keep the diversity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe realistic, in addition to including different kinds of people in order to let everyone have someone they connect to. All in all, the future of the MCU is looking bright.