Yesterday Marvel Studios gave us our first look at Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the release of the first trailer for Captain America: Civil War [watch it here], and Empire caught up with directors Joe and Anthony Russo to get some details on the upcoming movie, and how they’re adapting the classic comic book arc from Mark Millar.
“We’re using the essence of what Civil War was about,” states Joe Russo. “The comic book isn’t applicable to the storytelling that we’ve structured up to this point, but the concept of registration, the notion that heroes need to be either monitored or controlled because their power can be scary, is applicable. The Accords are the world jointly trying to govern the Avengers moving forward. It has to do with the effects of Ultron and Sokovia [the small city that Ultron tried to drop on the Earth from a great height at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron], and New York City [roundly trashed at the end of The Avengers], and Washington D.C. [nearly devastated by falling helicarriers at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier]. Examining the third acts of all the Marvel movies, we’re saying, if you could point to the collateral damage in all those incidents, could you use that against the Avengers to control them?”
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“The challenge was, we’re doing the story of Civil War, which everybody knows is nominally about superhero registration,” adds Anthony Russo. “And in a lot of ways that can be a political issue, and we didn’t want the conflict of the movie to solely exist on that level. We wanted to figure out very personal reasons why everyone’s relationship to this idea of registration is going to become complicated. That’s what the relationship between Steve and Bucky allowed us to do, to get very personal in terms of why people would lean one way or the other. The arc we’re tracking for Captain America, the thing we thought would be most interesting with this character when we came on board to direct Winter Soldier was to take him from the most ra-ra company man that you could get, this character who was a somewhat willing propagandist, and by the end of the third film he’s an insurgent.”
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Captain America: Civil War is set for release on April 29th 2016 in the UK and May 6th 2016 in the States, with Anthony and Joe Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) directing a cast that includes Marvel Cinematic Universe veterans Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier), Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch), Paul Bettany (The Vision), Don Cheadle (James Rhondes/War Machine), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Emily VanCamp (Sharon Carter) and Frank Grillo (Brock Rumlow/Crossbones) and William Hurt (General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross) alongside new additions Chadwick Boseman (Get on Up) as T’Challa/Black Panther, Daniel Bruhl (Rush) as Baron Zemo, Martin Freeman (Sherlock) and Tom Holland (The Impossible) as Peter Parker/Spider-Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=vndsq3tDJaI
Originally published November 26, 2015. Updated November 29, 2022.
