Captain America: Brave New World's reshoots remain a hot topic among MCU fans and, in an interview with The Wrap, filmmaker Julius Onah has attempted to set the record straight on the movie's additional photography.
While the writer and director is clearly choosing his words carefully (the extent of the changes remains unknown), it does feel like he's being very honest about why such extensive reshoots were necessary.
Describing that more as an "evolution" than a "change," he explained, "The nuts and bolts of the story, which was a dramatic triangle between Ross, and Sam, and Stearns was always there. The idea of an emotional journey with Sam that leaned into his sense of empathy as his superpower was something that was there, but I wanted to elevate further."
Onah confirmed that reshoots took Captain America: Brave New World from being "heightened" to "more grounded" and cited the Serpent Society being cut as an example.
"I think it gets a little deceptive in ‘a whole new character was added,’ because Serpent Society was always a part of the story, so the story function that Serpent Society serves in the film has never changed...we were deviating probably a bit too much from the grounded tone that we wanted the movie to have with how we had created Serpent Society at first."
"You know, they are people dressed like snakes in comic books, and they have snake-adjacent powers and stuff that’s really, really heightened, and you wanted an actor who could really help us lean, or gesture towards the fantastic, but without losing that sense of grounding. So it’s not like Serpent Society or the character changed. It was just, let’s really introduce a version of them that fits into the tone of the movie."
The Leader's appearance was altered significantly, something promo art and an officially released Funko Pop has confirmed.
The comic-accurate large head was swapped out for the sympathy-inducing deformed look we got in Captain America: Brave New World's final cut.
Onah told the trade that The Leader's telekinetic powers "[were] something that we played with a little bit, but it just became clear that his intellect as a grounded adversary was the more interesting thing to lean into and the more tonally appropriate thing."
In a separate conversation with Variety, he elaborated on the character's new look by revealing, "When you think about the arc of his character and the humanity that’s been taken away from him, there’s a monstrosity to him, and I really wanted to lean into that, so the moment you see him, you understand what’s propelling him as a character and his desire for retribution."
"We started off with an entirely practical version of it. You still see a lot of that practical work, in terms of prosthetics and paint stuff of that sort. It was great for Tim, because he’s very immersive in terms of what he likes to do as a performer."
"And then when we put it together in the movie, I wanted to push it even further, to make sure that that jump could come [over] on screen," Onah contained. "So we did enhance with visual effects, just to push it to that edge of something that hopefully wasn’t too off-putting, but again, helped you understand emotionally what was driving him."
There's obviously more to the story than just this, but short of a script leak or something along those lines, chances are we'll never truly know what Captain America: Brave New World looked like before its reshoots.
Onah has provided plenty of insights here, though, and it does seem Marvel Studios simply wanted to ground the movie in reality. Whether that was for the best remains up for debate.