Marvel president and CEO Kevin Feige said the “Harry Potter” franchise helped inspire the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
What happened: Feige spoke at the New York Film Academy earlier this week where he said the “Harry Potter” movies were a huge inspiration to the MCU, according to People magazine.
Here’s the full quote.
“I always default to my experience watching Harry Potter movies,” Feige said. “I went to see every Harry Potter movie opening weekend. I saw it and I enjoyed it and then I forgot all about it and didn’t think about it again until the next Harry Potter movie came out. And those movies were so well made because I could follow it all. I could follow it, I could track it, occasionally I have to go, ‘Who was that?’ but for the most part I could totally track it.”
“Now if I had watched every movie ten times, if I had read every book, I bet there are dozens of other things in there that I would see and appreciate, but they never got in the way of me just experiencing it as a pure story. So that’s kind of what we try to navigate. If an Easter egg or a reference or something is so prevalent that it gets in the way of the story you’re telling so that people who aren’t aware of it go, ‘What is this? What’s happening?’ then we usually pull back on it.”
What’s next: Unlike “Harry Potter,” the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t coming to an end yet. “Avengers: Endgame” earned more than $2.8 billion at the box office, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time, per IGN.
- The next phase of the MCU will include movies such as “Black Widow” and “The Eternals” in 2020. In the future, we’ll see “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
- The MCU will also make its way to Disney Plus with “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “WandaVision,” “Loki,” “Hawkeye” and “Marvel’s What If ...?” series, which will likely hit the Disney Plus by the end of 2021.