The MCU is 15 years old, and over the last decade and a half there have been some highs and some lows. There have also been many changes made to characters plucked from the pages of decades of Marvel Comics, including swapping race, gender and storylines to suit the needs of the cinematic world and the story it wants to tell. Kevin Feige recently discussed the origin of the MCU while speaking with Jon Favreau about the release of Iron Man, and the pair explained why it is right that the MCU will not be exactly what some people expect based on the comics.

“What’s amazing is there’s a lot of leeway because there’s so many different versions of different characters, there’s different writers who came in and different artists and each has an era. So there’s a lot to draw from but it also puts a lot of responsibility on the team whether it’s the writers or directors or producers who are trying to figure out how to make all this align in a way that’s palatable to a movie audience. Then you have two movie audiences, because you got the casual movie audience that just wants to come and have a good time, then you have the people who know it better than you do and how do you make it work for both of them, and it’s very tricky.”

Related: Kevin Feige and Jon Favreau On Trading Early MCU “Cheer Moments” For Laughs in Iron Man

The MCU Has Often Drawn Criticism For Making Changes to the Source Material.
Marvel Studios

There are many Marvel fans who will instantly call out any changes made to the classic versions of characters when they are being adapted into the MCU. However, as Favreau and Feige have said, there are some characters that have appeared in dozens of different styles, storylines and in some cases with different origin stories over the last several decades. The stories that came together to be the basis of the Infinity Saga were much more expansive and featured dozens of characters that have even now not been seen in the MCU, and others like Adam Warlock who featured heavily in the Infinity War stories, but has only now turned up in a very different form in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

If you go back through the history of Marvel Comics, there is no characters that have had a single linear story from their first appearance to the present day, and in many cases genders and races have been swapped multiple times on the page long before it was done on screen. No doubt, there will be many more changes to come as the ongoing story builds to Secret Wars, which itself has had multiple iterations within Marvel Comics’ history.

When it comes to pleasing all audiences and critics, there are very few movies that can manage to perform miracles, but as long as the MCU continues to pull in a decent box office total, the rest becomes irrelevant. Will it ever be as big as Endgame again? We still have a few years wait to find out.