Earlier this month, there were rumours that Marvel Studios was working on a live-action adaptation of their ultimate crossover storyline, Secret Wars. Now though a being of untold power who sees and knows all about the Marvel Cinematic Universe has stepped in to share his thoughts on these rumours. No, it’s not Uatu the Watcher or the planet devouring Galactus. We’re talking about the baseball cap-wearing cosmic force that is Kevin Feige.
“I’ve seen those rumours as well. Why is everyone talking about that now? That’s what I want to know,” he told ComicBook.com. “I think one person writes about it, and then another person writes about it, and then everybody’s writing about it, and then it’s happening.”
Now not to sound like an obsessed fanboy, but that’s not really a denial, is it? Feige even went on to admit that they could adapt the crossover one day. “Secret Wars is a great, giant crossover. There are a lot of great, giant crossovers that we could [adapt],” he said. “It’s the ongoing embarrassment of riches of Marvel Comics.”
If Feige’s looking for someone to blame for the Secret Wars rumours, we know a few people we could point the finger at. Jim Shooter, who penned the original ‘80s comic, claims someone contacted him to write a novelisation of Secret War. When he turned them down over a contract dispute, he was contacted by David Bogart, senior vice president of operations and procurement of publishing at Marvel Entertainment.
Bogart apparently offered Shooter $10,000 as a new retroactive work-for-hire contract. When Shooter asked if this meant Marvel was working on a Secret Wars movie, Bogart said he couldn’t tell him, to which Shooter replied, “you just did.”
Anthony and Joe Russo, the directing duo behind Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War, have also fanned the flames of speculation. Last year in an interview with IGN they called Secret Wars “event-storytelling at its finest”, with Anthony Russo saying: “It would be the biggest movie you could possibly imagine, so that’s what really excites us about the story – the ambition of it is even bigger than the ambition of the Infinity Saga.”
It also doesn’t help that Marvel seems to be setting up something with the multiverse. A lot of its recent Phase 4 projects, from Wandavision to Loki, have teased that the cosmic balance of the multiverse has been disrupted. We also know that Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will also tackle the thorny subject of parallel dimensions, so there’s clearly something in the water.
What it is exactly though we don’t know, and Feige’s not wrong, there are plenty of other Marvel stories that use the multiverse as a setting, after all. Who knows, maybe they’re teasing Marvel versus the DCEU? We can dream, can’t we?