In 2014, Marvel Studios held a special event announcing its slate of upcoming movies. Kevin Feige expertly trolled fans by unveiling "Captain America: Serpent Society" before later bringing out Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., and Chadwick Boseman to reveal the movie's real title as Captain America: Civil War.
Over a decade later, the Serpent Society will finally debut in this month's Captain America: Brave New World. Set photos confirmed that original plans called for Sam Wilson to battle a group of costumed supervillains (with WWE Superstar Seth Rollins among those cast).
However, both Rollins and those scenes have been left on the cutting room floor for a new opening sequence which Entertainment Weekly describes as follows:
"During an opening scene, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), now fully in his tenure as Captain America, heads to Oaxaca, Mexico. He and the newly minted Falcon, Joaquin (Danny Ramirez), fight against the clock to thwart the Serpent Society, a violent special-ops team that stole a sample of the indestructible metal called adamantium from a Japanese mining site for an unnamed buyer."
Captain America: Brave New World producer Nate Moore tells the site, "The Serpent Society is one of Cap's all-time Hall of Fame villain groups, but in publishing, they can be very goofy. You take something that seems inherently ridiculous, and you figure out what the context of it could be."
Asked about grounding Sidewinder, actor Giancarlo Esposito added, "I went back to the comic. I figured out what the guy looked like. I didn't want to look like that. [Julius Onah] wanted a groundedness of what I'm going to bring to it, but I wanted to borrow some color, the lining of the coat color, different subtleties from the original comic so I knew I could be channeling Seth Voelker."
While the Serpent Society has gone from being cybernetically enhanced villains like their comic book counterparts to Sidewinder's black-ops team, it does sound like the group has a future in the MCU (hopefully leaving the door open to a comic-accurate evolution)
Onah praises Esposito for bringing "a grounding and a gravitas to the Serpent Society through Sidewinder." He'd later tease, "It's just a great setup for more adventures first with Sidewinder and with Serpent Society going forward."
A new poster for Captain America: Brave New World has also been released which you can see below.
In Captain America: Brave New World, after meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, played by Harrison Ford in his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, Sam Wilson finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red.
The movie stars Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Shira Haas, Xosha Roquemore, Carl Lumbly, with Giancarlo Esposito, Liv Tyler, Tim Blake Nelson, and Harrison Ford. The movie is directed by Julius Onah and produced by Kevin Feige and Nate Moore. Louis D’Esposito and Charles Newirth serve as executive producers.
Captain America: Brave New World opens in U.S. theaters on February 14, 2025.