Marvel is gearing up for Awards Season and had a special "
For Your Consideration" screening of
Captain America: Civil War last night, followed by a Q&A session with Kevin Feige and Joe and Anthony Russo. The sibling director duo revealed (to an audience that included
HitFix) that at some undisclosed point during the film's development, they did entertain the notion of killing Captain America, which would be in line with the outcome of the original 2006–2007 Marvel Comics crossover from Mark Millar and Steve McNiven.
Those discussions must have been very brief as it appears Anthony Russo seemed to have forgotten them, asking his brother, "
We never talked about killing Cap in this one, right? No?" To which Joe replied, "
We did for a beat. We talk about everything." That seemed to jog Anthony's memory as he followed up with, "
I think the thing to remember is, we do talk about every possible scenario over and over and over again for months and months and months. We talked about it. But it never made its way into a realistic outline."
Of course, the end of the film came and went with none of The Avengers making the ultimate sacrifice, though T'Challa lost his father and War Machine was gravely injured. However, Feige clarified that the primary goal of Civil War was to splinter the team ahead of Thanos' arrival in Avengers: Infinity War. Joe echoed that, stating, "
We talked about lots of potential characters dying at the end of the movie. And we thought that it would undercut what is really the rich tension of the movie, which is this is Kramer vs Kramer. It’s about a divorce. If somebody dies, it would create empathy, which would change and allow for repair, and we didn’t want to do that."
Feige responded, "
In the amazing comic book story, which certainly the conceit of this movie is based on and some of the specifics — during their big battle, which has a hundred times as many characters, a character dies. And we talked about that for a while. And, ultimately, we thought what happened to Rhodey would be enough of a downer."
ComicBookMovie.com, and/or the user who contributed this post, may earn commissions or revenue through clicks or purchases made through any third-party links contained within the content above.