The Marvels Director Knew The Avengers: Doomsday Captain America Reveal "For Years"
“It's emotional [for] my nerd baby girl heart.”
Nia DaCosta wants everyone to know there’s no bad blood between her and Marvel Studios.
The Marvels director had spoken candidly about the grueling process of directing a Marvel movie, admitting that “the best didn’t happen this time, but you kind of have to trust in the machine.” DaCosta’s comments at the April 2025 Dublin screenwriting festival Storyhouse sparked a wave of discourse over the “Marvel machine” and how it can stifle the talents of indie filmmakers like DaCosta that Marvel loves to poach for their features. But DaCosta assures us that she’s still on good terms with Marvel and Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige.
“I mean, it's so funny because the way it was reported, it seemed very dramatic, but actually I f***ing love Kevin Feige, and we all get along,” DaCosta tells Inverse. “At the end of the day, [The Marvels is] a Disney film. It's a family film.”
In fact, DaCosta even got to visit the Avengers: Doomsday set last summer, where she says she got to see Chris Evans reprise his role as Steve Rogers. “I got to walk around to the set that they show on the teaser,” DaCosta says excitedly.
Nia DaCosta takes a selfie with Kevin Feige.
But DaCosta reveals that she knew that Steve Rogers was returning long before she visited the set last year. “I knew that Captain America was coming back for probably years,” she says, confirming that Evans’ return had been in the works for quite a while now.
She struggled to keep it a secret, but was relieved when the teasers were finally released over the past few weeks. She has a particular fondness for the X-Men teaser, because “I'm a huge X-Men girly and I was just dying,” DaCosta says. “I remember asking Kevin, ‘What is going to happen, Kevin? What's happening?’ It's emotional [for] my nerd baby girl heart.”
For now, she’s happy to watch from the sidelines. “I’m rooting for them, and I know they're rooting for me,” she says. She’s taken what she’s learned from directing The Marvels to make her newest film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s long-awaited 28 Years Later, and a very different film from her Marvel movie.
“There's a lot more blood in Bone Temple,” DaCosta jokes. “This movie is basically a very big-budget independent film, but because of my Marvel experience, I knew what to ask for going into this experience.”
