Marvel Studios Countdown: Should Captain America Face a Civil War or His Own Death

Note: Soon after this piece was published, Marvel announced that Captain America 3 would be following the Civil War storyline with Robert Downey Jr. joining the cast.The third Captain America film is Marvel’s big one for summer 2016, and fans are already looking ahead to what’s in store for what could be the end of a trilogy. Joe and Anthony Russo (of The Winter Soldier) will be back to direct, and they’ve been dropping hints in interviews that the film is something Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has been looking forward to since the very inception of the cinematic Marvel universe. Joe Russo told Crave Online, “If you’ve been talking to Kevin the title has been in place probably for 10 years in his brain. It’s all part of the road map that he’s laid out, and it’s all part of the bigger plan.”We know now that Feige is planning for the third film to be Captain America: Civil War,while others would;ve liked to seeCaptain America: Fallen Son (or the less commercial and thus less likely title The Death of Captain America) in the star-spangled Avenger’s future. This keeps the naming convention of the last couple of Marvel’s sequels, which have used titles from popular comics as their inspiration. Avengers: Age of Ultron, for example, borrows the familiar title but not the plot of the best-selling 2013 comic series.Civil War was a 2006 blockbuster miniseries that saw hero pitted against hero when a tragedy involving young superheroes the New Warriors led to new laws requiring superpowered individuals to register their secret identities with the government. Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) was pro registration, which put him and his supporters in direct odds with Captain America, who felt that it was dangerous to let the government handle that information. The series got national media attention when Peter Parker stood on the side of registration and revealed his secret identity as Spider-Man to the world (a key moment that would be improbable to bring to a Civil War film, as Sony has the Spider-Man rights).The problem with bringing Civil War to screen right now is that none of the superheroes in the movie version of the Marvel universe have secret identities to register, which breaks the central conceit of the plot. One workaround might be to have the heroes split over who is directly on the government payroll or not (and it would still make sense in this context for Captain America to turn down this deal, especially based on his interactions with the corrupt S.H.I.E.L.D. in Winter Soldier). The other problem is that Civil War is not a Captain America story, but a Marvel universe one, and if the title is ever used for a movie it would be best served as an Avengers sequel due to its sprawling cast of heroes.Fallen Son (aka The Death of Captain America) makes much more sense as a third Cap film, since the events in the comic storyline dovetail with the events in the second Captain America movie. In the comic, Cap is assassinated by Crossbones and a brainwashed Sharon Carter. Black Widow and Falcon attempt to hunt down Cap’s killers, while Winter Soldier picks up the mantle of Captain America at the final request of Steve Rogers.It’s rare that all the pieces from a comic are already there and ready to go on film, but we saw Frank Grillo’s character Brock Rumlow survive at the end of Winter Soldier with the assumption that he’d return as his alter-ego Crossbones. Emily Van Camp made an impression as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Agent 13 (aka Sharon Carter), so the potential for that twist is already in place. Of course Falcon and Black Widow are already tied to this franchise and waiting in the wings, and if contractual obligations are to be believed, then Chris Evans may be out the door as Cap anyway. We could be looking at Sebastian Stan as Captain America for the next phase of Marvel films after 2016.Fallen Son requires far less setup than Civil War and tells a more Cap-specific storyline. Civil War may be a more well-known, bankable title, but the timing feels wrong, especially since Marvel’s been slowly setting up something “Infinity Gauntlet” related for a couple of years now. That planning should eventually pay off in a film in which all of the current players of the Marvel cinematic universe unite to thwart Thanos, and we can’t see Marvel blowing the payoff of seeing all of its heroes in one big battle so early on and in a Captain America threequel. If we get Civil War, it’ll likely be an Avengers film, and the resulting film probably won’t look much like the comic book anyway (no established New Warriors, no rights to Spider-Man, no secret identities).Which Captain America storyline do you think Marvel should;ve gone with for Cap;s third outing? Or should they do some combination of both?Captain America 3, a Marvel Studios film starring Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan, opens May 6, 2016. There are 585 days until release.Follow