In the wake of the success of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” Marvel Studios opted to move forward with a third entry in the series, which became “Captain America: Civil War”.
Before it got to that point, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige rejected a different core concept for the film that producer Nate Moore and others on the team had been developing as a potential “Captain America 3”.
In an interview with The Town podcast recently, Moore revealed that originally the story was to have been built around an entirely different MacGuffin than the final film’s Sokovia Accords:
“We were developing Captain America 3, and we were [doing] really good. Winter Soldier worked, people were back in, they’re interested, and we were talking about a movie, and we knew we had to resolve the Winter Soldier storyline.
We wanted Cap and Bucky to ultimately reunite. And the plot that we… And we knew we wanted to use Zemo. What a great character. You know, he’s obviously a classic Cap villain. And we were building the movie around a MacGuffin around the Madbomb, which, the Madbomb goes off and causes normal people to start fighting each other. It’s honestly a little similar to what I think they did in Kingsman.”
Moore and the team thought it was going well until Feige stepped in and said the project wasn’t “big enough”:
“It was cool, and it was grounded, and it was political, and whatever, and [Feige] was like, ‘That’s not a big enough idea, guys.’ And we’re like, ‘Let us write a draft, and we’ll prove it to you.’ [Feige:] ‘Okay, prove it to me.’
As we’re getting done with it… he pulls me into his office, and he said, ‘You know, I think we should try to do Civil War.’ And I was like, ‘Kevin, we don’t have half the stuff that’s in Civil War. We don’t have the New Warriors, we don’t have… Here’s all the reasons why we can’t do it.’
And he’s like, ‘Go home, read it, let’s talk about it.’ So I went home that night, read it… I re-read it, ’cause I had read it before, and I was like, ‘Yeah, look we don’t have the Negative Zone prison…’ There were so many things that we didn’t have.”
Despite not having all those elements, Feige was still very confident in adapting Civil War and told the writer’s room to change course:
“So I went to the writer’s room with Markus, McFeely, and Joe, and Anthony, and Kevin peeked his head in and he goes, ‘So, stop with the Madbomb, you guys are doing Civil War.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, f—.’ And Joe was like, ‘Yes! Civil War? Awesome!’ And then we had to figure out how to do Civil War.
But he was like, ‘There wasn’t a big enough idea that would get audiences excited, and we did it. Look, It was scary, and when you’re throwing out a whole thing and starting new, it’s always a bit weird, but he was right. He was right. We were still able to pay off the Bucky storyline. We still figured out how to use Zemo. But the central conceit of the movie was something that audiences would gravitate towards, and they did.”
‘Civil War’ at the time ended up being an “Avengers 2.5” style project – pitting Captain America against Iron Man and introducing both Black Panther and Spider-Man to the MCU – major tasks in and of themselves.
The fourth film, “Captain America: New World Order,” hits cinemas on May 3rd 2024.
