It’s easy to joke about Kevin Feige having snipers at the ready whenever somebody’s in danger of revealing Marvel Cinematic Universe spoilers when they aren’t supposed to, but it becomes a lot less funny when it clearly isn’t a gag, with Samuel L. Jackson regaling an ominous story that unfolded a decade ago.
Having been in on the ground floor since the franchise’s very first project, the veteran actor knows more than most about the levels of secrecy that Marvel maintains at all times, but even at that, the company going full S.H.I.E.L.D. when his copy of the script for The Avengers was stolen is a thing of ominous beauty.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Jackson underlined in no uncertain terms that Feige could easily have anybody killed if he really wanted to, but thankfully it didn’t come to that.
“They shot one down. And they followed one back to where the dude was. They found him and, yeah, they got him. There are worse examples than that. I remember when we got ready to do Avengers, someone printed out a copy of my Avengers script that had my watermark on it, and put it online for sale. I was shooting in Canada and Marvel came to Canada. It had been printed in the production office… They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn’t show up. It was crazy.”
Fleeing the country so as not to face the wrath of Marvel’s hit squad is somewhere between hilarious and ominous, but it’s nothing if not a lesson for anyone out there who ever gets designs on crossing the boss.