Kevin Feige was happy to be the butt of the joke in the She-Hulk finale
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law showrunner Jessica Gao says Marvel boss Kevin Feige was "very supportive" of the show's meta ending
Aux News Kevin Feige
This story contains spoilers for the finale of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law.
The latest Disney+ Marvel offering, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, was unique to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a lot of respects. One major example is the way that the series poked fun at the MCU and the superhero industrial complex as a whole. This is especially evident in the season finale, in which the mastermind behind the MCU was an AI robot called K.E.V.I.N., a nod to real-life mastermind Kevin Feige.
According to showrunner Jessica Gao, Feige was “very supportive” of this twist, and in fact, the meta finale was partially his idea. “Kevin was the one who said, ‘There’s no reason to do a big Marvel ending. This is not a Marvel movie. You’ve made a show that’s completely different than anything we’ve ever done before, so there’s absolutely no reason to treat it like a typical Marvel movie. Do the thing that this was always going to be.’” Gao recalls in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “And that was so freeing and inspirational. That’s really what got wheels turning about going really out of the box and doing something that was more true to this show, as opposed to what’s true to a typical Marvel project.”
Once K.E.V.I.N. the robot was on the table, “[Feige] was all for it, and that scene is very much reflective of the relationship that I have with him. A lot of the conversation in that scene is taken from conversations that I’ve had with him,” Gao shares. The only thing the duo butted heads over was whether or not the robot should wear Feige’s signature baseball hat, something Gao was so passionately in favor of she jokingly threatened to quit over it. (“And then there was a split second pause, and he just went, ‘Thank you very much, Jessica. You’ve done some great work for us, and we really appreciate everything.’”) Luckily, visual development supervisor Jackson Sze was able to design a compromise.
Even with Feige’s full support, Gao is still “surprised I got away with most of that conversation” between Jen (Tatiana Maslany) and K.E.V.I.N. “[But] that’s the great thing about Kevin,” she says. “He likes to have fun, and he has a good sense of humor, both about himself and about Marvel. And just in general.”
In her own THR interview, Maslany said she wasn’t surprised about her boss’ reaction at all: “[Because] knowing Kevin Feige, he just has a creative mischief about him and a curiosity about things. And as a creative, it makes sense to me that he would be up for it.” Plus, a little light teasing isn’t going to hurt the bottom line, she noted. “Marvel is doing alright; they’re going to be fine. (Laughs.) It’s not like they’re struggling to get people to embrace their stories. They’re pretty well loved.” Fair enough!
10 Comments
For all of the supposed meddling, Feige’s approach seems to be:
1) Here’s a budget
2) We’re a comic-book movie, so we’ve got to do a few fight scenes
3) At least one of the post-credits scenes has to be a teaser for the next thing.
Zach Snyder would have had Gao killed just for suggesting this stuff.
Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard. Pulling punches on a joke about overworked VFX teams doesn’t get you a cookie.
C’mon, give ‘im the cookie.
I’m picturing an endless row of moloids chained to their computers pounding away on the latest CGI spectacle with mole man whip in hand in the foreground…
I’m bored with that story already. It isn’t fucking forced prostitution. Quit and go do something else.
Kevin, is that you?
The Cookie is a Lie.
It was stupid. I wanted to like the show, but that ending with it being the AI K.E.V.I.N. joke just took me completely out of the show. Don’t take too much credit there.
Turns out K.E.V.I.N. could easily have wiped out the existence of half the season and the boring episodes of She-Hulk and WandaVision and Loki, etc, etc. Just like that.