stan lee

Fans weren’t expecting the Stan Lee tribute that Marvel Studios had in store at the beginning of ‘Captain Marvel’.  Every Marvel Studios picture opens with the familiar red-backed animated montage, which resembles the flipping of comic book pages, featuring clips of the various movies’ stars.  But instead, that familiar into was replaced with a nearly identical version, featuring the many cameos of Stan Lee instead of the actors.  As the screen went dark, the simple phrase “Thank You, Stan” lingered before the movie began.

Fans have largely praised this fitting tribute, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has addressed paying tribute to Lee this way, with an exciting, fast clip at the beginning, rather than a more somber message or scene at the end.

“We were thinking about what to do and how to do it and whether to release something or put something out online. And we figured, as we always have, the way to pay honor to him is the way we’ve been trying to do while he was alive, which is the movies.

“I had always thought in the back of my head, should that day ever come — which as I’ve previously said, I wasn’t sure it would. Like, I envisioned him at 127 — that I would want something sort of touching and rousing up front, as opposed to sort of depressing at the end.

“I know that, not specifically but in general, a celebration is what Stan always wanted as opposed to any sort of mournful event. So, it happened very, very quickly soon after we got the unfortunate news.. We put that together and our visual development department, led by Ryan Meinerding, illustrated all those illustrations of him that you see, before we then go into the clips.”

Sony’s ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ was the first Marvel-inspired movie to arrive in theaters after Lee passed away last November.  That picture also paid loving respect to Lee, as well as Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko, who also passed away last year.  They went with a more serious mid-credits tribute, which was also well-received.  So it seems that fans are open to either way, as long as the films pay their respects to these legends.

Marvel hasn’t officially released the new intro online, but *someone*, *somehow* posted this clip online.  Yeah, it’s tilted, but you get the basic idea:

No word yet if Marvel will keep this Lee tribute intro in upcoming releases, but I think most fans would agree that they should, at least for ‘Avengers: Endgame’ and ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’.

Feige stated that Lee had filmed a few more cameos which are in the can, so fans can expect to see more of “The Man” in future Marvel films.

Source: ComicBook.com