STORY: 'Winter Soldier' Writers Hint at Captain America's Cinematic Future

That conversation offers the first of a number of hints at what lies in wait for Marvel fans, with Feige telling Gunn that he's concerned about revealing too much about the identity of a character in Guardians, saying that even naming the character "could not be a bigger spoiler." That character has a throne that levitates, although the source of the levitation is open to question. An annotation to the conversation suggests that relatively obscure villain M.O.D.O.K. — who does, indeed, sit in a floating throne — "is due for an appearance in a Marvel movie," interestingly enough.

The piece also mentions that Disney CEO Bob Iger and president Alan Horn "recently met with the Marvel team to talk about new heroes who will be introduced in Age of Ultron and could be spun off in their own films as well," although no names are mentioned. It's already known that the 2015 Avengers sequel will introduce Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), but could there be more heroes in the offing?

Iger mentions that Disney counted more than 8,000 characters in the Marvel library that could be spun out into movies and television projects. If that sounds overwhelming, be glad that Marvel Studios is apparently on top of things; Businessweek mentions a map of future projects in Feige's office that the exec likens to "looking through the Hubble telescope. You go, ‘What's happening back there? I can sort of see it.'"

The "back there," it turns out, is convincingly far off: "They printed out a new [map] recently that went to 2028," Feige teased to the magazine. That's seven years — or 14 movies, presuming the studio keeps to its two-movies-per-year rate of output, which itself is open to question — further on than Feige said Marvel was in its planning last year. Thinking ahead has worked out well for the studio in the past, and clearly it's in no rush to change things.