How Kevin Feige Encouraged The MCU’s Worst Ending
While we found the show far better than the haters did, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law arguably had the worst ending of any TV show (or movie, for that matter) in the MCU.
After getting what seemed to be the ending, our not-so-jolly green giant breaks the fourth wall, confronting robotic MCU head honcho K.E.V.I.N. in order to request a better ending for herself and her season.
The robot was a thinly veiled stand-in for real Marvel big wig Kevin Feige, who surprisingly approved of the ending and insisted that the robot appear “old, leaking, and busted.’
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law And K.E.V.I.N.
We know these details about Kevin Feige greenlighting the ending thanks to Jackson Sze, a Marvel Studios visual development supervisor who worked on She-Hulk.
At D23, Sze spoke at a Designing Marvel panel and revealed that he had to work around some unique challenges, including head writer Jessica Gao’s insistence that K.E.V.I.N. must wear the iconic baseball cap that his human counterpart is famous for.
But the real surprise for Sze was that Feige chimed in at the visual development meeting for the ‘bot, insisting (with more than a bit of self-deprecation) that his cybernetic stand-in appeared old and run down.
Talking To Marvel
In order to appreciate why Kevin Feige’s apparent endorsement of She-Hulk’s season 1 finale is so surprising, you need to first understand why that ending annoyed so many fans.
Originally, the show gears up to show us a very different finale, one in which She-Hulk’s nemesis becomes a superpowered monster, and our hero is joined by unexpected enemies (like Titania) and allies (like Bruce Banner).
Annoyed at this cookie-cutter ending, our title character marches up to Marvel HQ and discusses the finer points of algorithms and audience demands with K.E.V.I.N. (Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus) before requesting a happier, Daredevil-filled ending.
Kevin Feige’s Blessing?
On one hand, it’s a bit impressive that Kevin Feige gave this ending his blessing, especially because it was designed to make fun of how formulaic and predictable all Marvel content had become.
In this way, She-Hulk spoke for countless fans by demanding some innovation and originality from this long-running franchise.
However, while subverting our expectations like this was funny (and perfectly in line with She-Hulk frequently breaking the fourth wall in her comics), it arguably created more problems than it solved.
Ruined The Whole Season?
For example, what neither Jessica Gao nor Kevin Feige seemed to consider about this hilariously meta ending is that it effectively discarded an entire season’s worth of storytelling.
Everything had built up to the public seeing She-Hulk as a kind of uncontrollable monster, and we get no real resolution to that with the new ending.
Similarly, the major conflict between our hero and Todd Phelps (which was itself a meta-commentary on misogynistic men’s irrational anger toward powerful women) gets no real resolution, as he is simply arrested as part of the requested happily-ever-after ending.
The Worst Marvel Ending
Making fun of Marvel for its disappointingly formulaic structure is all well and good, but the show instantly proved that it didn’t have any better alternative.
Kevin Feige may have enjoyed getting satirically skewered like this, but the result was the worst ending in the entire MCU. And unlike She-Hulk, audiences have no opportunity to browbeat a robot into giving us something better (and no, kids, ChatGPT doesn’t count).
Source: The Popverse
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