True Detective: Night Country creator Issa Lopez reveals why she wouldn’t be interested in teaming up with Kevin Feige for an Marvel Studios project.

After the finale of True Detective: Night Country, the new season’s creator, Issa López, spoke about what could be coming next in a THR interview. She admitted that a follow-up season to Night Country with the same characters returning is “very tempting,” though she’s also open to doing more with the franchise with a fresh set of characters and storylines. Beyond a potential return to the HBO series, López was also asked if she would be interested if “Kevin Feige and his hat came knocking at the door,” and she suggested that she wouldn’t be up for it. This is because she wouldn’t have the same levels of freedom she had with Night Country, which allowed her to develop her own original characters with essentially free rein.

“It’s a very peculiar thing, True Detective,” she said. “It’s very unique in the sense of, yes, it’s a franchise, but each of its iterations are independent. It’s almost like a book. I mean, the only way that I made it part of the franchise is the tone and the feeling, as we’ve discussed the last time we talked, and the grammar of that mythology that unifies. That’s it. That’s all that makes it a franchise. Otherwise, I’m free and I’m free to tell the stories that I care about as long as I respect those elements and I use the same grammar. So it’s so fantastic.

López continued, “While if I jump [into another major franchise] — which nobody has invited me, let’s be clear — but if I jump in one of the other ones, that’s not the case. The characters are there. Often the cast, so many of the creative decisions have been made already, and those franchises are massively controlled. So I think it would be a very, very different endeavor. And anything that I cannot put a big, huge imprint of my own voice is not interesting to me.”

What About a Convergence of the True Detective Cinematic Universe?
During the airing of True Detective: Night Country, there were rumors of original series star Matthew McConaughey popping up to reprise his role. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but perhaps McConaughey and Jodie Foster could wind up crossing paths in a future season of True Detective. In her THR interview, it was suggested to López that McConaughey and Foster could unite for the “Avengers: Endgame of True Detective” that brings together the various stars of the franchise. This would even mark a special reunion for the two actors who previously appeared in Contact together.

In response to that idea, López said, “Right. That would be … (Pauses.) Oh, f***. Well, there’s an idea … (Laughs.) There you go!”