Marvel Studios president wants smaller, more intimate movies after Infinity War

After spending years crafting movies with inter-dimensional fight scenes and giant aliens crashing into Earth, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Vulture the future may look a bit smaller.

Although Feige said the studio doesn’t have any plans to completely get rid of “the big spectacle,” they’re much more interested in exploring the intimate sides of the characters they’re introduced to fans over the years. Part of that intimacy, he added, includes creating more crossover opportunity for characters within the Marvel Cinematic Universe when the opportunity presents itself.

“To us, it's less about continuing to go bigger with spectacle — although in some cases, we will — and more about continuing to go deeper with those character interactions,” Feige said. “I think it's possible to have more intimate movies after that, or to have more interesting, unexpected combinations of characters after that, absolutely.”

Feige added that Marvel has never intentionally tried to make every movie bigger than the last. As an example, he pointed out that in Captain America: Civil War, the climactic fight scene took place entirely on an airport tarmac and it was just between the superheroes, unlike the first Avengers movie. Feige said the reason people were drawn to that scene was because they had spent enough time building up the relationships and vulnerable side of the heroes that audiences actually cared about what they were seeing on screen.

One of the team-ups he’s most interested in seeing on the big screen himself is between Iron Man and Doctor Strange, but Feige said that fans will be in for a bit of surprise when they see which characters share a screen in both Infinity War, the followup to Infinity War and the films that are released after that.

Doctor Strange will hit theaters Nov. 4, with Avengers: Infinity War scheduled to be released May 4, 2018.