Did you ever think Seth Rogen's career would transition from roles like Cal in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Dale Denton in Pineapple Express to producing some of the best comic book adaptations such as The Boys, Invincible, and the forthcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem?
Given his penchant for comic book IPs, Rogen was recently asked what's prevented him from working with Marvel Studios on a project.
It seems it all boils down to the fact that he's a bit hesitant to change the way he and his partner, Evan Goldberg, operate.
"Honestly, probably fear. [laughs] We really have a pretty specific way we work; me and Evan have been writers for 20 years at this point. It’s a fear of the process, honestly. And I say that knowing nothing about the process. There are a lot of Marvel things I love."
"It’s mostly a fear of how would we plug into the system they have in place, which seems like a very good system, and a system that serves them very well. But is it a system that we would ultimately get really frustrated with? And what’s nice about [Mutant Mayhem] is that we’re the producers of this. So we dictated the system, and we dictated the process in a lot of ways. And that’s what’s also appealing for us about The Boys and the other bigger franchise-y type things we’ve done, is that we are creating the infrastructure and process for them, not plugging into someone else’s infrastructure and process. We’re control freaks!"
The execs at Marvel Studios having a firm hand on how their films and television shows would look and the story beats they needed to hit was a strong narrative in the media for quite a while.
In fact, there was a time when they had trouble landing directors (see Thor: The Dark World) and those who signed on for a project often expressed a firm desire to never work with the studio again.
That narrative has somewhat laxed in recent years as Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige has made a concerted effort to dispel such a negative association.
Still, when building a cinematic universe where events in one film need to connect to another, it's easy to understand the reservations that Rogen has about working on a Marvel project.
You can catch Rogen's latest producing effort, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, when it hits domestic theaters on August 02, 2023.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, after years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O’Neil helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.