I believe Marvel has stated that they are willing to go the Bond route and re-cast key characters as their contracts are up or as they age out. However, Sebastian Stan apparently has a 9 film contract. And Bucky has an established character arc in the comics where he takes over as Captain America after Steve is gone. As does Rhodey for taking over as Iron Man, come to think.
In any event, with decades of middling to good story arcs for them to mine from the various Marvel comics, I don’t think they’ll need to touch a stinker like Civil War. Although at this point I’d actually trust Marvel Studios to get the nuances of making both positions equally attractive and repellant… which is something the comic series very much did not do.
I most sincerely definitely without-a-doubt and stick-a-needle-in-my-eye hope that Marvel’s Civil War storyline is not in any way brought to the silver screen. I don’t even want to see the question of registering superhumans as a plotline in any of the movies–I know that such is an (almost) inevitable consequence of “realistic” storytelling in a superhero universe, though. Normal humans are going to want to do something to abate the fear engendered by what are essentially walking Weapons of Mass Destruction.
But… after 4 decades and change of reading comics, Civil War was the straw that finally made me give up comics for good, cold turkey, never looking back. Granted, there had been a whole pile of straws building up, but I really don’t want to give up my superhero movies, too.
I wouldn’t. Nuanced storytelling doesn’t play well in 2 hour clips, especially for popcorn movies that need action every 10 minutes. They would only have time to paint broad strokes (at best) and one side would have to be good and the other evil.
I’ve read that Marvel Studios is planned out until 2028, but those plans are fluid. One or two “John Carter”-like failures (more likely at least two) and we could see them going back to the old 3 movies/reboot trope. We’ll see. As a comic book fan for over 40 years (essentially since I could read), this is a golden age of comic book movies and even the bad ones are better than anything we got when I was a tween/teen/twenty-something, both in production values (even adjusted for era) and story-telling.* Even Green Lantern was light years ahead of the old Captain America movies from 30+ years ago. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
Another thing on the horizon is Marvel is trying to get back the rights to the characters it sold. If they’re successful we might be seeing Avengers/X-Men/Spider-Man crossovers at some point.
I think the X-Men movies are covering the superhuman registration story, so hopefully Disney/Marvel will find fresher angles to explore. Winter Soldier seemed to be all about NSA spying & Snowden whistleblowing but Ultron and Thanos and Dr. Strange should be good old fashioned good vs. evil.
For me it was the Joe Quesada Spider-Man making a deal with the devil to save Aunt May in exchange for his marriage never happening. What utter bullshit.
Y’see, I missed all of that. I am a big fan of comics - and have been since I was pre-literate - but gave up on superhero stuff ages ago. After all, what can they say that’s new after so many decades? But Civil War caught my attention because - whatever questions you might have about the execution - it was an attempt to show how governments and such might try to deal with an explosion of meta-humans.
I’d still like to see them deal with it in the MCU along with the death of Captain America. The symbolism is just too good to pass up.
There was roughly a five minute window when I was waiting for Redford’s character to rip off his face, but I’m glad they didn’t go that route. Perfect opportunity though when Black Widow plucks off her digital mask.
I honestly hope Red Skull shows up in Avengers 3. I want to see him teleport back from his exile with an army of off-world Hydra troops.
Dig that! Midway I leaned over to my 13-year-old and whispered ‘I bet he’s the Red Skull in disguise.’ I was wrong, but it still would have been awesome.
And we never saw a body, after all. He did that get-sucked-into-the-void thing that Loki did. Look how that turned out.
Still, I’m thinking that a return of the Red Skull would cause some real trouble at HYDRA. Baron Strucker ain’t about to go ‘Oh, hey boss. Good to see you’re back. Here’s the captain’s seat. I’ll be over here being subordinate.’
ETA: Oh and we both desperately wanted it to be Jenny Agutter kicking ass and not Natasha in that scene. It would have been cool to see that happen from out of nowhere.
That would’ve been a cool twist, trading in Robert Redford for Hugo Weaving. I know he said didn’t want to play the Red Skull anymore, but these films are always lacking a good villain.
I had thought this as soon as I’d seen the trailer.
There was a plot in the comics where Cap goes rogue after the Government tries to make him do things he wasn’t comfortable with. He sets off with his band of sidekicks (including Falcon) to make his own way as ‘The Captain’. Meanwhile, the government replaces him with a new Captain America, John Walker, who turns out to be a bit of a psycho. Eventually, the whole thing is revealed to be the plot of the red skull, who has cloned himself (using Cap’s DNA) and is now a blond guy and has infiltrated the highest levels of Washington
When I saw the trailers, I thought this was exactly what we were going to see here, with Rumlow taking over from John Walker, and Black Widow being part of the band of sidekicks
And don’t forget 3a, SHIELD decides to nuke Manhattan, apparently without consulting POTUS (IRL, I’ve read that’s a big reason why the Pentagon declined to help the studio with The Avengers).
It seems kinda weird that the example used to convince Captain America that the new carriers were necessary was garden variety human terrorists. In a world that has been invaded twice by hostile alien forces nobody should be giving a shit about normal terrorists. And shouldn’t D.C. be covered with high-tech anti-air weaponry in case some alien jerkward decides to open a portal over the city and invade?
It means that Chevys are nice, but if you need cover from bullets it has to be built Ford tough.
…probably worse than that, even, if there have been any parallels to Marvel’s comics events in the 70 years between Cap’s freezing and modern day. Even assuming there weren’t any horrific supervillain plots during or before Cap’s time that he wasn’t aware of.
Even in the modern movies’ time period we’ve had incidents of two Hulk-level monsters rampaging through major cities, militant groups backed by sorcerer cults/mad scientist transhumanists stealing and using weapons in the 10-kiloton range—from my own calculations of the Jericho’s yield in the first IM movie—and I think Agents of SHIELD also had a number of alien-derived superweapons running around loose, at least one of which was dangerous enough to warrant launching it into the sun…
It’s like a Mad Max sequel where the hand-wringing moral quandry is over installing red light cameras.
