In an interview with THR’s Awards Chatter podcast, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said that Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter had previously pushed back on Feige’s efforts to expand the diversity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, confirming rumors of Perlmutter’s long-time obstinance.

Perlmutter, who became chairman of Marvel in 2001, then CEO of Marvel Comics in 2005, has previously come under fire for, according to Financial Times, reportedly making racist comments. There's also his considerable financial support of Donald Trump, according to LA Mag. Perlmutter was also infamously frugal with budgets, according to Variety. In 2015, Disney ordered a switch to the chain of command, allowing Feige to report directly to Disney chief Alan Horn. Just last October, Disney promoted Feige to Chief Creative Officer for all film, TV, and comic publishing ventures of Marvel.

When THR asked Feige if Perlmutter’s views on diversity helped spur the change, Feige was fairly open in his brief response.

"That's part of it,” Feige said. “There's a lot of sides to the story. You can pick up Bob Iger's book 'The Ride of a Lifetime' to learn more, I highly recommend it, but it made sense at that time. We had made ten movies or more that managerially, there was another way to go."

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Disney CEO Bob Iger has notably also had a strained relationship with Perlmutter. In the same book that Feige mentions, Iger describes how he observed the tensions between Feige and Perlmutter form.

"Kevin is one of the most talented film executives in the business, but my sense was that the strained relationship with New York was threatening his continued success,” Iger wrote, according to Variety. “I knew I had to intervene, and so in May 2015, I made the decision to split Marvel’s movie-making unit off from the rest of Marvel and bring it under Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Studios. Kevin would now report directly to Alan, and would benefit from his experience, and the tensions that had built up between him and the New York office would be alleviated."

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Iger also wrote that he pushed Perlmutter to stop stymying Feige’s push for Black Panther and Captain Marvel films.

“We had a chance to make a great movie and to showcase an underrepresented segment of America, and those goals were not mutually exclusive,” Iger wrote. “I called Ike and told him to tell his team to stop putting up roadblocks and ordered that we put both ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Captain Marvel’ into production.”

Perlmutter’s role has been increasingly diminished in the last few years, while the MCU will only be getting more diverse. Marvel’s Phase 4 lineup features the likes of the Chinese hero Shang-Chi, the standalone Black Widow movie, the Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, and multiple black heroes like Sam Wilson’s Captain America, Blade, and Black Panther 2.

Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer for IGN.