Okay, The Marvels is a big fat flop. However, even amidst the negativity you’ll find it difficult to find someone putting any blame for that on Kamala Khan star Iman Vellani.
Vellani is arguably the finest piece of Marvel Studios casting since Phase One and it’s genuinely difficult to imagine anyone else embodying Ms Marvel as well as she does. What’s even more surprising is that she landed the role out of nowhere.
Though she’d never performed professionally, Vellani sent in an audition tape, with Marvel execs so impressed they called her in for a screen test and eventually decided to take a chance on this charismatic newcomer.
Now Kamala Khan is at the core of the MCU’s ongoing plots: gathering the “Young Avengers” into a team and she’s a key part of the arrival of the X-Men. But why stop there? Marvel Studios has had some major wobbles after Avengers: Endgame, so here are eight reasons Kevin Feige should step down and let Vellani run the show.
She’s a Marvel Universe expert
Vellani is notorious for her deep knowledge of the Marvel Universe. She was a fan long before she was cast and has consistently displayed a scary depth and breadth of knowledge of the franchise. This has come in very useful on the set of Ms Marvel and The Marvels, during which the cast and crew turned to her for advice:
“Everyone was very protective over me being the youngest, but I also knew way more than them about their own characters. So the tables turned when they needed help with something. They’d be like, ‘I don’t understand this scene. What’s the lore behind it? What’s actually going on? Are we punching a moon back into orbit? What?’”
This is how Feige himself got his start in superhero movies, being the guy who’d explain the comics to the cast and crew of X-Men when it was being shot in 1999. Vellani has shown she doesn’t just know the lore, but that she can effectively communicate it.
She knows how to improve a movie
One of the key qualities in a producer, and one that Feige has historically been good at, is suggesting how to improve a movie. Vellani has the confidence to do that and her input is already sought after:
“If I’m flagging something, they should probably listen before someone else flags it when it’s already too late to make changes in the movie. So I appreciated being that person they could just go up to. I got to see cuts of the movie before anyone else did just because they wanted my opinion.”
She understands the VFX pipeline
Every live-action Marvel Studios project makes heavy use of VFX and knowing how to coordinate between actors, directors and VFX artists is key to making these movies work. You only have to glance at Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to see how badly things can go wrong. Fortunately, Vellani already seems to have a firm grasp of the situation:
“Lesson here to all actors doing action scenes: Find your VFX supervisor, become their besties, ask them a million questions! Because honestly, you’re creating this thing together. They’re not going to do all the work for you. They’re basing their VFX off of your actions. And I think it’s also very possible that you’re going to ask them a question that they didn’t even consider.”
She does her research
Aside from her work in the MCU Vellani is also making waves as a writer in Marvel Comics. She’s already worked on a Ms Marvel series, which has dovetailed with an X-Men one-shot. And, even though we’re pretty sure she could do this blindfolded, she’s knuckling down and doing the work:
“I needed to do a lot of X-Men research and I never really read those comics because they’re so intimidating. There’s a million of them. So I watched the X-Men ‘90s cartoon in the background. I had Grant Morrison’s New X-Men on my laptop. And then I was reading Jonathan Hickman’s new X-Men. It was so much X-Men all at once.”
This is precisely what we’d want from someone at the head of Marvel Studios and one area in which we feel that Kevin Feige has taken his eye off the ball.
She speaks truth to power
Even Kevin Feige has to answer to his bosses at Disney, but he’s historically known for fighting his corner in the face of executive skepticism. Vellani hasn’t had a chance to do that yet (as far as we know), but she has proven she’s willing to argue her case and not bow down to authority. After all, she famously got in touch with Feige himself to scold him for making the MCU Universe “616” in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (she’s right, incidentally):
“The comics are 616. I don’t believe that the MCU is 616. As much as Kevin Feige can make us think that it’s 616, it is 199999.”
Feige responded with a sad face emoji — and rightly so!
She has a solution to Marvel’s Kang problem
As Variety recently identified, Marvel Studios has a Kang problem. Kevin Feige built the next few phases around Jonathan Majors’ villain, only for him to get into significant legal trouble. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty has now lost a writer and director and seems to be being reworked. And guess who’s got a fun idea to fix it?
“I think it would make sense for Kang to be a version of the Molecule Man, where he’s existing in every single universe, and there’s different variants of him. We’ve already seen that. So that makes sense. But also I feel like he could be the Molecule Man and The Beyonder all at once.”
Works for me, and it’d be a great way to begin switching out Majors for another actor.
She understands the fans
There are legions of Marvel fans out there, some casual and some more hardcore. Vellani absolutely falls into the latter category and is anonymously involved in several fan communities, saying “r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers is my second home”. She also did a very well-received Reddit AMA in which she charmed damn near everyone. We won’t quote every single response, but this about sums it up:
“Dear Iman, thanks for helping to restore my confidence in the next generation of Marvel super heroes.”
She deals with failure well
This is more important than you might think. Over at Warner Bros the DCEU was bedevilled by executives bending over backwards to please an imagined online opinion or drastically overreacting to movies even slightly underperforming. The endpoint of this philosophy was the truly awful The Flash, about which we do not need to say any more. As The Marvels has cratered we now have Vellani’s approach to things not going to plan:
“I don’t want to focus on something that’s not even in my control. Because what’s the point? That’s for [Disney CEO] Bob Iger. I’m happy with the finished product, and the people that I care about enjoyed the film. It’s genuinely a good time watching this movie, and that’s all we can ask for with these films. It has superheroes, it takes place in space, it’s not that deep and it’s about teamwork and sisterhood. It’s a fun movie, and I’m just so happy that I can share it with people.”
Wise words and an indication that she will stick to a plan rather than flail about like a Warner Bros exec.
Marvel Studios has had a terrible 2023, but despite this, we doubt that Disney will consider removing Feige anytime soon. But a few more flops and the big chair might become empty… and we think there’s nobody better than Iman Vellani to fill it.