1. This Guy Knows What He's Doing
Ten years ago, not many people had heard of Kevin Feige. Now he's one of the most important people in Hollywood thanks to the unprecedented success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Less than five years after the studio announced plans to finance and distribute its own movies, Disney shelled out a cool $4 billion for the company. As current President of Production for Marvel Studios, Feige is the man that oversees everything to do with the MCU and recently revealed he would remain on board at least until the end of Phase 3. It seems easy to forget after 5 years, 7 movies and $5 billion in box office, but nobody in Hollywood had ever attempted an undertaking of this scale before; establishing an interconnected movie universe over several individual franchises that culminated in all of them coming together in the same movie. It was a gamble all right, and one that paid off spectacularly. Despite a reputation for being notoriously difficult to negotiate with, a trait that saw Terrence Howard and Edward Norton recast before further discontent following the success of The Avengers (when the likes of Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo earned $2m apiece to Robert Downey Jr's astronomical $50m), Feige isn't what Hollywood would call 'a meddler'. Yeah, he makes sure that the movies adhere to the Marvel template and follow canon but the directors are usually left to their own devices. Now the MCU is rapidly expanding; the Marvel One-Shots are self-contained stories that offer insights into the smaller moments in the Marvel mythology, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D television series follows the agency as they investigate superhero-related cases around the globe (and teases the mystery of just how Coulson is back from the dead), while lesser-known heroes including Black Panther and Doctor Strange are in active development. In the wake of this success, others are attempting to jump on the Marvel bandwagon; following the collapse of DC's Justice League movie, it was announced that Batman would appear in the sequel to Man of Steel in an attempt to create a shared DC Cinematic Universe, Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past will feature a massive cast in a sequel to both the original trilogy and 2011's reboot First Class, The Amazing Spider-Man series seems to be building towards a Sinister Six storyline, while even notorious hacks Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are attempting to shepherd Universal's stable of iconic monsters into what they call a 'shared universe'. I wonder where they got that idea...