Kevin Feige Hints At All-Woman Avengers Film Led By Tessa Thompson

@Okayplayer was present and accounted for at the Thor: Ragnarok press junket where Kevin Feige offered some interesting news.

Thor: Ragnarok is the kind of action flick that masters the stylistic flourishes that others lack. The heroes have consistent, monumental story arcs that are grown acutely next to balmy wit and polish. That’s no surprise considering the all-star cast includes Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Jeff Goldblum and Mark Ruffalo. Better still, the director, Taika Waititi, conducts the cast and the huge film with the same oddball, indie cinematic affect as his previous work Eagle vs. Shark and What We Do In The Shadows. It lends a brevity, a lightness of being to the work that make the previous two seem drab. Sometimes all you need to brighten up a room is to rip the carpet up to expose the gleaming wooden floors underneath.

Waititi said as much right up front. “I knew my strengths were in tone and character and relationships,” he said. “I tried to ignore the scale… It’s such a huge, huge film.” He continued, “I tried to remember what’s most important is the two or three people trying to remember their lines.” Great advice for any filmmaker, but also serves to show how a project with a massive budget can be served by someone who remembers the little things. In this movie, those small moments added up.

At the presser for the film, the stars poured into the Montage Hotel at Beverly Hills. Which, if you haven’t been, is the kind of place where vested men and women trolley thousands of dollars worth of designer luggage back and forth to Porsches and Range Rovers in a semi circle driveway that feels terribly unfit to have anything at all parked in it. The kind of place where the stucco somehow seems to sparkle.

The press junket we attended covered a swath of ground. On whether Mark Ruffalo will ever get a Planet Hulk movie, he shared these tidbits. “I would love to do a Hulk movie and I think we all would love to do one,” he said. But that’s when the let down came. “A year ago, before I even had this part, Kevin asked me to come over and have a script meeting. Basically, he sat me down and he said, ‘What would you like to do if you had a standalone Hulk movie?’” Ruffalo revved into high gear, “I said I’d like to do this this and this, and this this and then this… and then it would end like this!” Kevin Feige then replied, “I love that, let’s do that over the next three movies starting with Thor 3 and then carry it on with Avengers 3 and Avengers 4.” So not only will we be getting a lot more Hulk in the coming films, but they will weave his standalone storyline into the larger films of the MCU.

The info drops didn’t stop there. Tessa Thompson talked how some troll on the web called her playing Valkyrie “white genocide.” She said the reaction was “just as baffling as Norse mythology.” “You know, the thing that I’m tasked do with any character that has its own iconography is to capture the spirit of the character and the spirit of all of us has very little do with what color we are.” Then, when asked if we could be looking at a Valkyrie solo movie, Feige said, “That’s not a bad idea.” She would deserve one, since, bar-none, she had the breakout performance of the film. It went even further. When Thompson asked Feige about an all-female superhero movie he said, “It was a pretty amazing moment when your shoulder gets tapped, you turn around, and every female superhero we’ve got says, ‘How ‘bout it?’ I said yes.” So does that mean we’ll soon be getting an all-woman superhero film? Feige’s comments and the success of Wonder Woman means we just might.

When asked about Loki’s growth in Ragnarok, Tom Hiddleston said, “In a way, in this film, it’s about the development of the relationship between Thor and Loki as brothers. Thor has evolved, matured, and grown and Loki, in a way, is stuck in his challenges of the past.” He goes on to say, “We’ll see,” to the question of whether Loki will do less scheming and more superhero-ing in the next few films.

Lastly, did Thor miss his hammer? Hemsworth said, not breaking character, “It allowed Thor to move differently... and that was a great thing.”

Thor: Ragnarok officially gets released November 2.

Andre Grant is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer who has written for HipHopDX, Complex and The Well Versed. Follow him (and us!) on Twitter @DreJones.