Monday, February 6, 2017

Feige on Female Character Merchandise

Certain fans have been up in arms recently about a lack of merchandise featuring female characters. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige recently spoke on the matter (via)
That was very frustrating for us because we see it from the other side. When I say we, I mean the filmmakers, because we’re presented with the stuff that’s being made, and I don’t know if there’s an absolutely equal sampling, but Black Widow was all over that.

Gamora was all over that stuff. What we don’t see is how much of it is in any given store. How easy is one piece of merchandise to find versus another piece of merchandise? So, we see the stuff and we go, ‘Oh great, these are all our characters, they’re all greatly represented. They’re all going to be sold.’ Then we find out, oh, you can’t find this, you can’t find that, or there’s lunch boxes or a backpack where a certain character is not on it, and I think the outrage was great because that’s not going to happen anymore. And that was one of our big things we set out to do, and it was very important to James as well, was putting, as we did in the first film with a number of characters and even more so this time, women at the forefront of the story.

We can’t have sway over what a retail store, how many items of what they want to stock on a shelf.But when toy sets come over, or t-shirt designs come over if they’re not represented properly or representative of the film, we’re not even saying, ‘Is the equality of each gender specific?’ We’re going, ‘Does it represent the movie we’re making?’ If it doesn’t, we send it back until it does.

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