Kevin Feige Confirms He’s Met with Ava DuVernay for Black Panther, Makes No Promises About Female Directors or Diversity

Rumors that Ava DuVernay will officially be helming Black Panther have escalated over the past few days, and in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel’s Kevin Feige confirmed that he has at least taken a meeting with the Selma director:

We’ve met with her for sure. We’ve met with a number of people for a number of movies. She has been one of them… We need to find the best director for any given movie, and that’s really where we always start. If diversity is part of that, it’s great. It’s important. You will start to see things across the industry as a whole change as more filmmakers come up through the ranks and become part of making movies like this.

When asked specifically about the likelihood of a female director helming an upcoming Marvel movie, Feige replied:

I think it will happen sooner rather than later, without giving too much away. You look back sometimes, and it’s just the nature of this industry, or the nature of the culture, but there’s a big shift happening. What’s exciting about Marvel, go back and look at the source material: It’s been diverse in a cutting-edge way going back to the ’60s, and I think we’ve represented that effortlessly and accurately in the movies we’ve made up to this point, but certainly with Black Panther and Captain Marvel doing it in a much more overt and purposeful way.

I might just be bitter from yesterday’s Spider-Man announcement, but I wish that Feige seemed a little less ambivalent about striving for diversity in the upcoming film slate (although it’s totally possible that he’s just not at liberty to say anything more definitive).

That being said, I don’t trust that greater representation will ‘simply happen’ in the MCU without a concerted effort, in the same way that female directors and directors of color won’t just organically “come up through the ranks” in Hollywood. The American film industry is designed to be dominated by white men, and I wish that Marvel felt comfortable in this instance using its massive platform to state the obvious: diverse creators aren’t a luxury or a happy act of fate. They’re essential to making the diverse movies audiences deserve.

(via ComingSoon)

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