Marvel Studios president and CEO Kevin Feige said he thought “Thor: Ragnarok” wasn’t going to do well among massive nation audiences.
What happened: Feige recently spoke at the New York Film Academy where he said he thought “Ragnarok” was a “crazy” film that wouldn’t sit well with audiences.
- He said the marketing team had to really promote the film to make it work, according to We Got This Covered, a news site dedicated to movie and television news.
“We have the greatest marketing department in the world at Disney right now, maybe in the history of movies, they’re the greatest. Sometimes, we have a movie like Ragnarok, and we’re like, ‘We’re trying something here and it’s a little crazy, so good luck,’ and then they deliver us the teaser that you see for Ragnarok, which is, ‘He’s a friend from work!’, was essentially one of the first trailers they showed us. It was great, and it was amazing. Taika [Waititi], watching, went, ‘Oh, we’ve got to make that movie!”
What else: Feige said at the same event that he often looked at the “Harry Potter” franchise as an example of how to craft the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to the Deseret News.
- Feige said the wizarding story inspired the MCU, per People magazine.
“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.”