Kevin Feige Answers Your Lingering 'Thor: Ragnarok' Spoiler Questions

Thor: Ragnarok leaves viewers with some questions and we were lucky enough to sit down with Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige to get some answers. Feige shares the story behind the items in Odin's vault, how that huge cameo appearance came about, meaning of the post-credits scene (sort of), and much more. Here are the answers to all of your Thor Ragnarok spoiler questions.

Obviously, spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok follow, so proceed at your own risk.

***

How's it going?

Good. Great Captain EO t-shirt.

Thanks! Before we get into this, I've got to ask you a big spoiler question.

Uh, oh.

Everybody's probably asked this, but what is that big ship in the end credits scene?

Oh. A few people have asked. What do you think it could it be?

Well, I think the most obvious guess is that it is Thanos' ship.

[Feige begins nodding his head.]

It's a good guess.

Just a good guess?

Yeah. You won't have to wait very long to find out. What was it? October? Seven months, eight months...

You're a big fan of Star Wars. It was reminiscent of the opening of A New Hope, with a huge ship and then being eclipsed by an even [bigger ship].

Yeah, that, I mean, that wasn't intentional, but it yeah, sure. Sure. I'll take it. It's a good example. We just love the notion of it was sort of a last bit of comedy for the movie. I have a feeling everything's gonna work out just fine. Ssshhhit.

You retcon the Infinity Gauntlet in this. Kind of. There's an Easter Egg in–Thor 1.Yeah, the first Thor film. And you kind of deal with it here. Can you talk about the story of getting there?

Going all the way back to Phase One, where Infinity War was a barely a glint in our eye, we were working on Avengers and trying to get just put that all together for the conclusion of Phase One.  And it's in one shot. It's in one shot in the background.

But now people have that pause button and 4K televisions.

And also, it was on display, I think at Comic-Con. In the Marvel booth. And pretty quickly after that, within a couple years, we were like, well that's clearly not the Gauntlet. The Gauntlet can't be in there. And we had an internal Marvel theory that it was fake. That Odin who you've seen in the other films and who's a... I guess a good father. He's kind of an okay father. Kind of fosters the rivalry.

As we learn in this movie, he vanished his firstborn daughter because he sort of got what he needed, he got to the top of the Nine Realms and it was like oh, this is much too violent. And Hela says, glad to have it, ashamed of how we got it. And we see that mural in the movie of [how] it was not a pleasant history of how Asgard got all that gold. So Odin has a history of doing what he wants to do to maintain power. And going back, I mean, now it's probably five years ago we started again just in our internal creative group saying, "Well, it's fake." Because if the Asgardians knew that there was something that had that kind of power, that could theoretically wipe out Asgard and whatever else with a, in the comics, a literal snap of the fingers. They might question Odin's ability to protect them.

So Odin put a fake and he goes, it's fine, I got it. Look, it's fine, it's in our vault, don't worry about it. And it's not until Hela goes down there. It was fun being back in that vault, by the way, for the first time since Thor 1. It was just the opportunity to call it a fake. So for people like yourself, and like all of us at Marvel Studios who were paying attention, that answers that question. And for people who have no idea that an out-of-focus Infinity Gauntlet appeared in the back of Thor 1, it just showcases her knowledge and her sort of disgust with the way Odin had handled things on her way to the true power that is below the surface.

And we also see Loki in that area. He walks by the Tesseract.  When that planet blows up at the end, I assume that particular Infinity Stone is not on that planet.  

You were at Comic-Con, right? Did you see the Infinity War footage?

Yeah, and Loki had the cube in his possession in the footage.

The story I'm about to tell you is nothing about the mythology, just about filmmaking, I was just talking to Hiddleston about this. When he shot that, he had the Surtur skull and he walked by and he looked at [the tessaract] but then he kept walking. And he left frame. And it was like that in the cut for a while. And nobody remembered the moment. It didn't register with anybody. So we recut it so that Loki looks at it and then we cut away. When we showed that cut, it registered with people who knew what it was. Did he take it? He stopped, what does that mean?  Which was exactly what we wanted the audience to do.

Speaking of end credit scenes, in Age of Ultron, there is one with Thanos getting the Infinity Gauntlet, the real one we assume.  And he says, "Fine, I'll take care of it myself" or something like that. But at Comic-Con you unveiled Thanos' minions, the Black Order.  

Yeah, they're extensions of himself. I mean, that's sort of what he means versus the Lokis and the Ronans and the other players that have had contact with it and were doing things as he sat on a throne. He likes...he used to sit on a throne a lot.

My last question is how did the Matt Damon cameo happen?

We had this idea to do this stage play that brings some people up to speed on the fact that the Asgardians believe Loki to be dead. We thought it was funny that Loki was putting on a show for himself in an amphitheater to his own image. And we had the idea for a Hemsworth, not Chris, to play Thor in it and that's Luke Hemsworth. Taika said he was gonna have Sam Neill come in and play Odin. And we were trying to think of who could come in and play Loki. And at one point Hemsworth said, what about my mate, Matt? We said, who's your mate, Matt? He goes Matt Damon. Okay. Yeah, sure, call your friend Matt Damon. See if he wants to play Loki in a play. And next thing you know, Matt Damon's on set wearing a Loki costume and shooting it. He just flew down. I think he was in New York and he flew down to Atlanta. Because of his friendship with Hemsworth. It was amazing.

I think it's remarkable that you couldn't keep Samuel L. Jackson a secret for even more than a few hours, but that has been...

That's a good point. You mean on Iron Man 1?

If I remember correctly, that story broke like the same day he filmed the end credits scene.

Yeah. And here's the weird thing, we went to much greater lengths to keep Sam Jackson a secret.  He pulled onto the stage in his car, he never got out of his car outside. Nobody even cared who we were back then. It was the first one. And as far as I know, I mean, we have a certain level of security at all times, but Matt flew in, shot it and flew out. He was there for a couple days hanging out.