Back in January, Warner Bros. set the stage for the biggest superhero movie showdown of all time when it pushed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice back ten months, setting a release date of May 6th, 2016 – a date already earmarked by Marvel Studios for a then-untitled movie, which has since been confirmed as Captain America 3. Both Warner Bros. and Disney have subsequently stated that they have no intention of moving dates again, and now Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige has reiterated that Cap won’t be backing down from the World’s Finest.
“The Dark Knight movies were rather successful and genre-defining, they altered the genre in big ways,” Feige tells Empire. “So I think there has always been competition that way. I mean Iron Man was the number one movie of 2008 until The Dark Knight came along, and I loved it. frankly. I love that the number 1 and the number 2 movies of that year, and it has happened a number of times since then, being comic-book movies, even if it wasn’t one we made. Here we are now, 14 years since the first Marvel movie I worked on. At that point it had been eight years and for about those eight years people had been asking ‘How much longer gonna last?’ ‘When are people gonna get tired of these movies? And my answer always was ‘People only get tired if a whole slew of terrible ones come out’. And it was our job to make sure that doesn’t happen. If there are other people out there interested in that not happening as well, I’m all for it! So I continue to be all for quality entertainment for moviegoers to enjoy on weekends. If it is on the same weekend I enjoy it slightly less. But we are doing what we’ve always done, which is sticking to our plan and sticking to our vision for the movies going forward and we have a very large vision that we’re working on for Cap 3 and for all the threes movies and just because another movie plops down onto one of ours doesn’t mean we are going to alter that. Maybe we should, but we’re not going to.”
Is Marvel right to hold firm with its release date for Captain America 3, and can Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers have any chance at the box office against the might of DC’s biggest superheroes? Let us know your thoughts…
Originally published July 20, 2014. Updated November 7, 2019.
