The lack of female directors in the MCU back catalogue has been a source of criticism and controversy for a few years now. Marvel will be taking its first steps in addressing this imbalance though with the upcoming Captain Marvel, which will see Anna Boden at the helm alongside her regular co-director Ryan Fleck, while it’s also been reported that the studio’s looking exclusively at female directors to handle the long-awaited Black Widow solo movie. Not only that but, Kevin Feige has now implied that there may be more female filmmakers to come.
A Tweet from Digital LA relays an exchange between the Marvel Studios president and an audience member at this weekend’s Produced By Conference, and it reads as follows:
Audience question: Marvel has had men directors for its past 20 some movies. Can the next 20 feature women to balance?
KF: I can’t promise you that all 20 future Marvel movies will have women directors, but a lot of them will
Marvel’s come close to breaking their all-male streak in the past, of course. A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay was in talks for Black Panther but eventually turned the project down due to creative differences, and for a while, Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins was attached to Thor: The Dark World before she was dropped from the film.
As far as female superhero movies go, Marvel chairman Ike Perlmutter certainly did the studio’s public image no favors with a leaked email back in 2015 where he seemed to be making a case for why female-led films are a bad investment – a notion that was, of course, later challenged by the success of last year’s Wonder Woman.
With the release of Captain Marvel on March 8th, 2019, we’ll finally see how Marvel fares with its first female solo outing, as well as their first pic with a woman at the helm. It will be Hope van Dyne, however, who becomes the first female superhero to feature in the title of an MCU movie when Ant Man and the Wasp hits theaters next month, on July 6th.