Getting your kids to be interested in your work isn't always easy, even if you are the president of Marvel Studios and Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) overlord Kevin Feige.
Speaking with TheWrap, Feige shared that his son wasn't really interested in his work with Marvel characters until the arrival of Marvel Rivals, a free-to-play title from NetEase Games that first launched back in December 2024.
“Suddenly, he was asking me to tell him more about Hela. Tell him more about The Punisher and these other characters. And then he started seeking them out in the shows,” Feige said, with TheWrap noting that Feige also gave a shout-out to Jeff the Land Shark.
Jeff is particularly interesting for Feige to mention, as he's not yet been seen in the MCU.
While Marvel Rivals exists in its own convoluted continuity — there is a complicated ongoing story with various versions of characters pulled in from different points in the Marvel timeline, such as Marvel 2099 — the game's design has undoubtedly been influenced by the MCU in ways both small and great.
One example is in how Loki and Hela are adoptive brother and sister, just like in the 2017 film Thor: Ragnarok, instead of father-daughter as in Norse mythology and the original Marvel comics.
Marvel Rivals may be helping the MCU, in very small ways
With an increasing number of video game adaptations, there are naturally a lot of discussions around games benefitting from movies and TV series.
Shows like Prime Video's Fallout expose the game setting to a new audience, introducing more potential players and generating additional positive word-of-mouth. The show was so popular and successful that Fallout game sales and player counts spiked the same month it launched, propelling Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 up the charts.
Perhaps it's a bit early, but I can't help but wonder if a similar thing could be happening for Marvel Rivals, but in reverse. Marvel Rivals has absolute deluge of outfits available for purchase, including several MCU-themed skins and character packs.
In fact, the next major addition to the game is a pack of skins for the Fantastic Four, letting players decorate Marvel's first family in the same style as the upcoming MCU movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The movie and the outfits are both slated to launch on July 25, 2025.
With so much attention for MCU properties in a popular free-to-play game — NetEase mentioned back in February that the game had crossed 40 million players, a milestone it's assuredly exceeded all these months later — I can see younger kids and preteens that didn't grow up enthusiastically watching the MCU becoming more interested after seeing supplementary material like this.
Even looking outside of the MCU, there may be some tangential benefits for Marvel as a whole. The recent lineup of swimsuit-themed outfits for characters like Loki coincided with Marvel bringing back its Swimsuit Special comic book.
Marvel Rivals is currently available on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (via Steam and the Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 5.
