Recently, a rumor popped up in Variety related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since it is, whether true or not, pretty spoiler-y, I’ll stick it behind a spoiler break–everything after the break will discuss future Marvel movies, so don’t click on it if you don’t want to discuss.
Okay. The rumor floating around is that ‘Captain America 3’ will feature a major part for Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, and that it will kick off a MCU version of ‘Civil War’. Cap will wind up on the run, pursued by Iron Man for refusing to sign on to the Super Hero Registration Act. This, in turn, will be the thread that links Phase Three of the MCU together, culminating in ‘Avengers 3’. And of course there’s all sorts of random rumors orbiting the central rumor, like Cap dying and being replaced by the Winter Soldier, and a new Avengers team being introduced that includes Ant-Man and Doctor Strange, and Thanos being pushed back to Avengers 4 as the big villain, and…
Now obviously, it’s worth taking all these rumors with a shaker of salt. There’s a lot of time between now and 2016, and crazy rumors about the Marvel movies are the stock in trade for entertainment magazines. Marvel Studios has made no official statement confirming or denying the leak, so it could all just be a bunch of hot air. And even if there is a kernel of truth to it, an adaptation of ‘Civil War’ might be as different from the original as the ‘Winter Soldier’ story was from the comics. That said…if they really are doing this, here are three reasons why it would be a colossally stupid idea.
1. ‘Civil War’ was a trainwreck. There is literally no level on which ‘Civil War’ was capable of working. The idea of pitting two of Marvel’s main heroes against each other ideologically is a disaster on the face of it, because one of them is Captain America and is the moral center of the Marvel Universe, and the other is Iron Man, who’s an alcoholic control-freak who’s made numerous questionable decisions in the past from “I’m going to obsessively hunt down every single person who stole patented technology from me including the federal government and oh by the way accidentally kill a guy in the process and cover it up by claiming that ‘Iron Man did it'” to “I’m going to erase the knowledge that Tony Stark and Iron Man are one and the same from everyone’s mind using mind-control satellite technology” up through “I’m going to invent a process for curing spinal damage and never share it with anyone ever”. And even if you can put these two on the same moral and ethical footing, arguing that superheroes are inherently dangerous and need to be regulated isn’t the way to do it, because that debate simply can’t be won by Iron Man’s side in the Marvel Universe, because the entire conceptual framework the fictional universe rests on is the idea that super-powered vigilantes are necessary to keep the world from sliding into chaos. Literally every single Marvel comic up to that point is an argument that Tony’s wrong, because you can’t spend forty-five solid years telling stories about irresponsible idiots who need governmental oversight to keep them from making fatal mistakes. Tony’s argument is
And so the whole central concept–‘Iron Man and Captain America have an ideological conflict that sets them at odds with no real “right” or “wrong”‘–turned into ‘Iron Man becomes a colossal douchebag who outright causes the deaths of multiple superheroes, while Cap tries to stop him”. Nobody but Mark Millar wanted to write Iron Man as the hero, and he wasn’t talented enough to make it work on his own. And since the story was designed to show the moral grey side of Cap’s libertarianism and the heroic side of Iron Man’s benign crypto-fascism, it couldn’t ever work once everyone except the writer had decided that Cap was the hero and Tony was the asshole. Especially not because Iron Man was the ultimate winner–ending the story the way they did meant that the third act simply didn’t exist. Issue #1 started with, “The SHRA has been passed, and heroes choose whether to go on the run or join Tony Stark’s superpowered army.” Issue #7 ended with, “The SHRA has been passed, and heroes choose whether to go on the run or join Tony Stark’s superpowered army.” The only thing that happened in seven full issues was which heroes ended up in jail at any given moment. The actual end, such as it was, didn’t come for years. Which was a bit of a problem, because…
2. Besides being a trainwreck in and of itself, ‘Civil War’ was a trainwreck that damaged Marvel’s brands. Let’s face it, the entire metastory of the Marvel Universe for the ensuing three years after ‘Civil War’ was, “How do we dig ourselves out of this steaming pile of crap we leapt into face-first?” Captain America was killed, replaced, resurrected, replaced again, and came back one more time before giving up the entire thing as a bad job. Spider-Man literally made a deal with the devil to undo everything that happened in his comic since ‘Civil War’. And Tony Stark had his brain reset to factory settings rather than continue to be associated with the character Millar portrayed. What about this track record says, “Hey, let’s do it all again with a far more popular version of the franchise?” And even if you somehow see something salvageable in all this…
3. ‘Civil War’ doesn’t fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the comics, you can at least make an argument that there are so many superheroes and supervillains running around that some sort of regulation could be helpful. (It’d be a terrible argument, but you can make it.) But the MCU? On Earth, they’ve got Cap, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye. Oh, and Deathlok and Mockingbird if you want to count the TV shows. Of these, six are or were active government employees, and the other two have been willing to side with SHIELD when the situation called for it. There simply aren’t enough unregulated vigilantes running around to justify a Super-Hero Registration Act.
And even if there were, who would you put in charge of it? After the events of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the idea of putting all the superheroic eggs into one governmental basket is the sort of thing that would leave just about everyone twitchy. The single biggest governmental overseer of weird Marvel strangeness turned out to be co-opted by a crazy cult of ex-Nazi technocrats with the end goal of murdering a few million obstacles who stood between them and world domination. One of the senators who was demanding that Iron Man give over his armor’s secrets to the army turned out to be a HYDRA agent in disguise. Is anyone, in that climate, going to be clamoring for more governmental control of superheroes? (Admittedly, rumor has it that one particular hero is going to invent an army of killer robots that tries to take over the world and wipe out all organic life in ‘Avengers 2’, which may well be used as an argument for more oversight of arrogant technocratic industrialists, but we’re right back to the problem with the original ‘Civil War’. The only person who really needed someone reining him in was Tony, and he was the one who was put in charge of the whole thing.)
It’s worth mentioning at this point that a lot of people thought that ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ was going to be a huge mistake, and Marvel bucked those odds to create a huge success. It’s also worth mentioning at this point that I wasn’t one of those people, and my intuition has been pretty good regarding successes and failures in the comic-book movie genre. And assuming this is actually true, this feels like a disaster in the making.
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I’ve heard this rumor going around and had… basically the exact same thoughts. Civil War is the comic book story NOBODY wants to see come to the movies.
I would not call Cap “libertarian.”
I was with you 100% right up until the “It’s worth mentioning that I am always right, so don’t even bother” coda. That was… really weird.
I really don’t see how it’s possible to make a good Marvel movie where the plot line forces you to decide which heroes are fascists. That seems fundamentally flawed. Let’s just not do that, instead.
I think part of the reason that Civil War gets thrown around so much is that it was the most recent Big Marvel Event at the time that Iron Man came out, and it had Iron Man on the cover, so it was probably a lot of people’s first entry into the world of Marvel comics.
I don’t want this to come across as “ugh, all the new fans don’t know how much it sucked”, just that I think there’s most likely a large crowd who read it and had it set as kind of their baseline for comics.
(I stuck with Ultimate X-Men until Ultimatum because it was the first comic I ever bought. I certainly understand where they’re coming from.)
@BSD: In general, no. In ‘Civil War’, I’d say it’s a good summation of his attitude to the SHRA. Iron Man was not the only person to be written badly out of character in that story, he was just the one who suffered from it the worst.
@Chris K: Call it a pre-emptive defense at all the people who will say, “But everyone said that about the first ‘Iron Man’ movie and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, and look how good those were!” Which I get told a lot, and then I have to explain to people how I thought that ‘Iron Man’ looked awesome and how I thought that ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ looked brilliant from the first trailer on. 🙂
Also keep in mind that Iron Man’s character was still in the toilet when the first movie came out, Robert Downey Jr’s ludicrous charisma had just as much, if not more to do with rehabilitating the character as the brain reboot. If Marvel fucked him up now they’d be putting Tony Stark back in the very same situation that they rescued him from in the first place.
As a broader concern, I have no idea how Marvel could keep Thanos in the public consciousness as a viable villain until Avengers 4, which would come almost a decade after the character was introduced at the end of the first Avengers. Either they play it subtly and everyone stops caring about him or they make him the villain in GoG2 and he stops being a mysterious and unprecedented threat.
I mostly just don’t get the point in doing Civil War in the cinematic universe. Sure you have the two opposing leaders in Cap and Iron Man but that’s pretty much it. The third most important character is Spider-Man and Sony has him. The fourth most important character is Mr Fantastic and Fox has him and the rest of his family*. Wolverine (also tied up with Fox) isn’t hugely important to the story but his tie-in did address a glaring plot hole in the main story; it was done in a monumentally stupid way but at least someone went after the actual villains.
*I’d really love your comments on the general childishness of the recent F4 rumors.
After that you’re left with a bunch of pivotal characters that don’t exist in the Cinematic Universe like She-Hulk, Ms Marvel, Hank Pym, Cloak, Dagger, and the New Warriors. I’m not even sure there are enough surviving movie villains to fill out a Thunderbolts team …though I’d rather have Zemo’s team anyway.
The characters they CAN use aren’t particularly important to the story. Thor was dead at the time. Hulk was in space**. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were persona non gratta among the hero community. Hawkeye and Black Widow were … wait, what were they doing; it must not have been very important?
**Where’s THAT movie? Planet Hulk would be awesome. Plus they could go the route of the animated movie and give the Silver Surfer role to Beta Ray Bill so they don’t have to fight with Fox over rights.
Also I like that Movie Hill isn’t a total moron and any halfway faithful adaptation would have to severely reduce her competence.
Plus they JUST DID a “Cap on the run” story in CA2. They shouldn’t be repeating themselves already.
@Beacon
Zemo’s Thunderbolts could actually be a good gimmick for Avengers 3 if Marvel wanted to do an all new team. Secret villains co-opting the banner of our disbanded heroes could be a good enough hook to offset the rumor that Marvel is just trying to save the final contracted appearances of their more expensive actors.
The problem with Planet Hulk as a movie is that it’s primarily a Hulk story, not a Banner story. So while it might be possible technically, I don’t know if the studio’s gonna be eager to do a movie with nothing but varying degrees of alien makeup and CG, without even a standard human chump to ground it like Guardians had. If the rumor that Hulk will get rocketed into space in Avengers 2 is true I expect that the most we’ll see of Planet Hulk is a flashback or something when he shows up in GoG2 and conveniently turns back into Banner. Putting Hulk with that crew would also provide some impetus for a return to Earth, which Marvel would need for a team-team up movie.
@SilverHammerMan: Planet Hulk is such a good idea that I don’t know why they haven’t already done it. I’d steer clear of the whole “Illuminati” angle, make it the government (maybe General Ross?) who shoots him into space, but “Alien Spartacus starring the Hulk” screams box office gold to me. 🙂
@John Seavey
Oh, I’d definitely rather see Planet Hulk than another attempt at the same boilerplate Hulk story they did with the last two movies. I just don’t know if it makes sense to do a movie where, if they were faithful to the comic, their leading man would spend the vast majority of it as a CGI monster. The story could probably be overhauled to just star Banner, but frankly that loses a lot of the appeal for me. Then again Mark Ruffalo isn’t as much of a commodity as Downey or Chris Evans, so Marvel might be open to having him just do mocap and voice acting.
1) Yes, if they simply did a direct conversion of the Civil War storyline, it would be an absolute disaster. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ideas in there that they couldn’t put to good use – much as they’ve been doing with all the marvel movies already.
There are plenty of (literal) levels on which the Civil War storyline could have worked. Yes, as noted, it turned into a ‘turn all superheroes into a private government army’ story, and was a one-sided scenario featuring numerous heroes acting wildly out of character. But if it instead focused on the original premise of ‘have some level of oversight and accountability for the actions of costumed (and/or superpowered) individuals’ – then you can absolutely build an interesting narrative from that.
2) To some extent, this is a question the movies will need to address eventually anyway. “Where do we go from here?” Will the same actors continue in these roles for decades to come? Probably not. Does Marvel plan to reboot things every so often, or do they try to create an ongoing narrative with legacy heroes? Or do they try to maintain the comic approach of stalled time without really acknowledging the passage of years, and just swap in new actors for the roles every so often while trying to maintain continuity?
I don’t know the answer to that. But I bet Marvel has certainly thought about it. And I don’t think that answer will change, regardless of whether Captain America 3 somehow damages a character’s brand beyond recognition. Even aside from the fact that I think it unlikely we’ll see any characterization approaching what we saw in Civil War, I also think the scope itself ensures there can’t be as much fallout.
Civil War spanned how many comics and characters? Over how long a length of time? A 2-3 hour movie will inherently be a much more focused and streamlined story. (With, perhaps, additional fallout seen in Agents of SHIELD and whatever other Marvel shows are running at that time.)
3) If you count the tv shows, sure, we’ve seen less than a dozen ‘heroes’ in action. But SHIELD has featured – and set the precedent – for there being quite a few super-powered individuals out there, even if many of them are villains or mercenaries, or bystanders, or whatever.
More to the point, we’ve also got the potential for any number of super-powered entities to show up – whether it is from alien races we’ve seen, the various forces working on super-soldiers, etc. One of the themes in Agents of SHIELD is that the world is on the brink of a super-powered arms race. I think that – the developing presence of super-powers and vigilantes (rather than the existing status quo of them that was present in the comics) – would be the focus on any Civil War story.
Not the idea, necessarily, of ’rounding up all the vigilantes to keep track of them or weaponize them’. But instead, simply needing to establish laws/protocols/etc regarding super-powered beings – whether alien gods or man-made soldiers or geniuses in fancy machines. The fact that SHIELD was supposed to take care of that and self-destructed so disastrously is even more reason for something more to be done about it.
Now, what is the ‘right’ thing to do about it, and who is the ‘right’ person to put in charge? No idea – which is exactly what sets the stage for a debate over between, say, two opposing camps. With, perhaps, Cap on one side and Iron Man on the other. And you could easily fuel a creative and engaging story from that without needing to make either character a comical villain.
4) Now, with all of that being said? For myself, I’d be perfectly happy not going with Civil War for Cap 3, and going in another direction entirely. Like Beacon mentions – it would seem awfully close, thematically, to Cap 2. And while I think that questions about the politics of super-powered beings could be interesting, I’m not sure I need every Cap movie to go down that road.
Here’s what Kevin Feige said about a Planet Hulk movie:
“I think what’s cool about the Planet Hulk story is it’s all Hulk. He’s a gladiator, he’s fighting all these creatures on another world. Yes, some of those creatures show up in [Guardians of the Galaxy], which makes people think, ‘Oh, maybe it could exist.’ And maybe it could exist, someday. I don’t think that’s the first place we would go though for the very reason that you stated, which is, if we were ever able to do a standalone Hulk movie, 60 percent of the fun would be seeing Mark Ruffalo leading a Marvel movie — and that’s what we would do if we ever went down that road.”
I’m inclined to agree with him. I like Hulk, but his basic dynamic is very tricky, especially with the false status quo he has to endure, as John has pointed out in his Story-Telling Engine series. So you get lots of writers that try to avoid that dynamic by removing Banner and making the Hulk intelligent, or throwing in new Hulk personalities for Banner to deal with, or putting Hulk into space, etc, etc.
Some of these are good stories, to be fair, but they often feel like the writers trying to get as far away from the basic premise as possible, or adding on lots of bells and whistles. I think a new Hulk movie needs to finally establish that the normal Hulk/Banner dynamic can hold a movie together on its own, instead of going off on a major tangent, because so far neither of the previous Hulk movies have been able to pull that off.
I think there are two really big obstacles to doing the Thunderbolts.
The team works best when you use established villains and the movies tend to kill off villains. Still, I suppose you could make due by picking from Abomination, Leader, Loki, Strucker, Zola, Batroc, Winter Soldier, and Crossbones or introducing Zemo, Fixer, ect in a future movie. It’s probably best to avoid SHIELD villains though since they don’t have the name recognition.
Also – even if we as fans agree to keep quiet – Marvel’s marketing team WILL spoil the Masters of Evil reveal for the general public just like they did with the Winter Soldier’s identity. Granted I guess they could do what they did in CA2 and use the reveal we’re expecting as misdirection for an even bigger surprise.
I still want a T-Bolts movie but it’s problematic.
I really don’t get how the CGI and monster makeup required for Planet Hulk is a negative. Most of the cast in GotG was either CGI or unrecognizable and that movie worked fine. If the person playing Bruce Banner doesn’t like it…well it isn’t like Marvel feels its Hulk actors are irreplaceable.
@Beacon
Widow was on Tony’s side during Civil War, but she didn’t do very much. Hawkeye was still on sabbatical following being resurrected after House of M, traveling the world and banging Scarlet Witch Doombots. He returned after it was over and joined Cage’s renegade Avengers as Ronin.
I thought since they keep having Thanos do cameos and are hinting about the Infinity Gems, that Avengers 3 would basically be Infinity Gauntlet. Which as Marvel crossovers go was a lot more satisfying and still works without the whole cast of characters.
An additional problem is that MCU-verse Tony Stark is kind of the last person you want wielding this much authority. This is the man who, after building his super-suit, flew off to another country and began killing brown people. And then, after telling everyone what he did, built a theme park dedicated to himself. Not exactly a paragon of virtue here.
@Beacon
I think whether the Thunderbolts are established villains really depends on the story; whether it will have a redemptive arc and/or a twist as to the team’s true intentions.
If it’s gonna be more of a lighthearted caper film about opportunistic crooks who wind up becoming good guys, as I my preference, then I think a brand new cast of C-listers is fine, or even preferable. Maybe throw in an established villain in the Baron Zemo/Citizen V role and you’re good to go.
If it’s gonna be a darker affair, maybe forgoing the redemption stuff, then returning villains are a bit more important, though I could still see a team of half newbies and half old hands.
I don’t know that it would be possible or even worthwhile to preserve the original twist anyway, holding onto that bombshell would be a lot harder for a two hour movie than a 22 page comic, and I think the premise of a supervillains playing superheroes is probably a better marketing angle than just having them sold as knockoff Avengers.
Thunderbolts isn’t that hard. Have “new heroes” show up to help Hawkeye, and do a villain reveal at the end of the first act. In the second, Hawkeye snoops on Zemo and gets caught. Hawkeye outs him as a literal Nazi/Hydra bastard, and the T-bolts, who weren’t aware of his real identity, turn on him for a third act of destroying Hydra goons and war machines like the end of Captain America one. The rest of the T-bolts may have been minor crooks, or purely duped as required for future plans. Voila. Stand alone team movie and something to expand on Hawkeye’s character.
To some extent, this is a question the movies will need to address eventually anyway. “Where do we go from here?”Will the same actors continue in these roles for decades to come? Probably not.
The elephant in the room is that it’s very hard to see Iron Man remaining a viable movie character without Robert Downey Jr to play him. Or much more importantly, it’s very hard to see Tony Stark as a viable movie character without Robert Downey Jr to play him.
My first issue with Civil War was that they had the characters reversed: Cap is the guy who obeys orders (see Avengers Annual 15). Tony is the guy who’s used to ignoring orders and doing things his way (Armor Wars, for instance). Maybe it could work if they switched the characters and toned down on the whole “create an super-hero army” thing.
They could do Civil War as a simple “Captain America and Iron Man are at odds with each other” over something unrelated to the stupid superhero registration act. For example, Tony Stark could decide that rebuilding SHIELD (with him in charge – because nobody else could be trusted to do it right) is the right thing to do while Steve Rogers decides that it’s the worst possible thing you could do given the whole HYDRA infiltration of SHIELD thing. As well as the fact that Tony is an unstable alcoholic douchebag – a charismatic and likeable douchebag but at heart a douchebag.
I could actually see that working, to be honest. But it wouldn’t be Civil War. It would be “Captain America and Iron Man fundamentally disagree about something and lock horns over it”. Which I guess is kind of the central spine of Civil War, even if the Civil War event is actually much more sprawling than that.
(And it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, which is that in an argument about morality and ethics between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers Steve Rogers is going to be right. Because Steve Rogers is at his heart the most ethical and moral individual in the Marvel universe, and Tony Stark is a selfish douchebag who makes a lot of bad choices and is constantly trying to fix the problems he creates with those bad choices.)
There’s already a corrupt government villain set in the form of all the Hydra moles still in governmental positions. So, at this point, a variation of the Civil War storyline sounds like a way to resolve the third act of a story set up by Cap 2.
Instead of casting Tony in the role of benign technocrat, and trying to set up a morally ambiguous story, they can cast any one of numerous Hydra guys in the role of truly villainous and homicidal (though publicly benign) technocrat. It strips out the moral ambiguity, but really, that wasn’t working for the story anyway. Clearly the capes and masks are the good guys, and clearly those wanting to reign them in aren’t. So run with it and use a Civil War light to clean up Hydra and set us up for something else (like, say, Thanos). That’s how I’d roll it, if I were utterly convinced that Civil War was what they were going with.
I actually think Civil War would make an awesome movie.
Seriously, hear me out.
The biggest problem with Civil War is that you can’t have a comic book crossover story where both sides have a point and then put Iron Man and Captain America on both sides of it. Why? Not because they’re overly nuanced characters or something. No, just because at the end of it at some point the characters have to go back to being on the same side. Marvel isn’t going to turn one of its A-list characters into a villain permanently. (There are more reasons, but given reasonable assumptions about crossovers, that will do as the main one.)
But they can in the movies, and arguably it would even be a good idea. RDJ doesn’t want to play Iron Man forever, and the studio doesn’t want to continue to pay the salary he can command. And even if he’d work for free, he’s the oldest actor behind any of the Avengers by more than 10 years, not counting Samuel L. Jackson. Tony Stark becoming a bad guy is much more likely to work in the movies and much more likely to stick. The new status quo probably wouldn’t actually make him a villain, but a Civil War-like conflict would be a perfect reason for him to have a reduced role in future movies. Best of all, that means they wouldn’t have to do the “both sides have a point” thing to begin with.
To be clear, I don’t actually think any of this is likely. I’m just saying Civil War would naturally make a much better comic than a movie.
@Myth: Yes, the TV show does set up that there are loads of other superhumans out there. But it also sets up that they are registered, monitored, assigned “handlers” to make sure they don’t use their powers in unauthorized ways, and kept under control. So arguing that a SHRA is necessary doesn’t make any sense.
Also, Season Two of ‘Agents of SHIELD’ is establishing that a lot of these “handlers” were secretly HYDRA agents, brainwashing the supers into a private army they can use in their quest for world domination. So, um…arguing that a SHRA is a good idea doesn’t make any sense either. 🙂
Basically, ‘Civil War’ is just utterly incompatible with the MCU, because it’s a program that they tried already, and because its horrible horrible flaws are already exposed.
Really, Marvel needs to either make peace with or grind into dust before them the Fantastic Four movie rights holders, because the MCU really, really needs Skrulls. (The Kree-Skrull War is one of the most filmable Avengers stories, and Secret Invasion works a lot better than Civil War if you want to get the heroes paranoid and fighting among themselves.)
Yeah…yeah, this is all sorts of a bad idea on a conceptual level.
Marvel has earned the benefit of the doubt (IMO), but I just don’t really see this being a satisfying or particularly logical next step.
Cash cow be damned, let the franchise breathe after Avengers 3. Particularly with DC ready to contribute to the market saturation.
@John: Basically, ‘Civil War’ is just utterly incompatible with the MCU, because it’s a program that they tried already, and because its horrible horrible flaws are already exposed.
It could be good, it could be bad. Claiming it is ‘ttterly incompatible’ is just silly – and, yes, does put you in the same camp as those that made similar, blind statements about GotG. There are any number of pitfalls they will need to avoid, but it is just absurd to claim that there exists no possible story, involving elements from the Civil War storyline, that they can make work in the MCU.
As for the entire fallout from SHIELD and the existing Hydra-infiltration storyline… I don’t think that gets in the way of an SHRA or something similar. I think it sets the stage for it.
Where do you go from there? If there are indeed numerous super-powered individuals out there, and more showing up every day, from any number of different origins… do you try to rebuild SHIELD and do it again right? Do you just ignore the problem and hope it goes away? Does Tony Stark step in, try and privatize the entire thing, since he’s the only one he trusts to get it right? Does Cap try and build a network of heroes from the ground up, who rely on and support each other rather than operating as a branch of the government?
There are any number of directions you can go from here, and many of them can offer conflict between Iron Man and Cap without resorting to the cartoonishly simplistic viewpoints they adopted in Civil War.
Now, Steve and Tony having a reasonable civil discource to resolve their differences likely doesn’t make for an exciting movie, so there would probably be other elements in play that might cause tension between the different camps – or might be manipulating any division for some other end. Hydra, Loki, Mandarin, etc – take your pick.
Again, my point isn’t that they need to do this or that they are guaranteed to get it right. My point is simply that it is possible to build a perfectly decent story out of the general narrative behind Civil War, and that the MCU is already well set up to tell just that sort of story.
I’m not objecting to the statement of “This is a tricky plotline and they have to be careful not to get it wrong.” I’m objecting to the statement of, “There is literally no way for them to get this right.”
I think that they CAN “get it right,” but that it isn’t really a great thematic fit for what they’ve built thus far.
Like, I’m okay with angst, but Civil War was almost entirely built upon angst.
It’s risky commenting on a storyline as it’s unfolding, but so far, Hickman’s current Avengers storyline is unfolding as a much better Civil War than Civil War–for me, at least.
One of the main objections to the Registration Act is that some heroes need secret identities.
Nobody in the Marvel Movie Universe has a secret identity.
In the Marvel Movie Universe, all of the superheroes are already “registered.” SHIELD knows all about all of them.
“It’s risky commenting on a storyline as it’s unfolding, but so far, Hickman’s current Avengers storyline is unfolding as a much better Civil War than Civil War–for me, at least.”
It’s pretty good, if a bit slow. I think it’d have much more of an impact if it weren’t sandwiched between Marvel’s juggernaut of seemingly bi-monthly “ZOMGCROSSOVEREVENTS”.
Maybe they’ll take a similar approach to Civil War as they did to the Mandarin.
“Now I can reveal the truth, Tony and I were only PRETENDING to get embroiled in a ridiculous multi-movie-spanning conflict. In reality it was all an elaborate trap to capture the Masters of Evil!”
“Wow, you really had me going there, Cap! Nice acting chops!”
“Yeah, he maybe sold it a little TOO well. Learn to pull a punch, Rogers.”
(GENERAL LAUGHTER)
Civil War is funny because for all the shit it gets (and yes it was terrible), its still probably the second most successful crossover OF ALL TIME behind Crisis on Infinite Earths and even thats arguable as CW brought a lotta new fans into marvel.
It was a mix of the Iron Man movie taking off only a few years after CW, the CW status quo lingering for about 4-5 years in 616, the success of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, marketing, and the sensationalist aspect of CW (CAPTAIN AMERICA VS. IRON MAN!!!!!) that made CW the first major exposure to comics alotta people had.
Civil War was bad but it’s hardly the worst cross-over event ever.
What if it’s not Civil War but Armor Wars? Stark, aghast after the Ultron debacle, wants to destroy his tech and Cap has to try to stop him? Which means Cap’s in an awkward position, following orders and Stark has more of a point than he did in CW? SHIELD is not fully rebuilt yet, Hydra’s still a threat, to say nothing of Loki et al. – the world needs the Avengers, just in time for Thanos to show up, looking for the last of the Infinity Gems in Avengers 3 (which is rumoured to be two films anyway).
There goes my dream of an invaders movie.
I think the Tony Stark of the MCU isn’t enough of an asshole to cause Civil War. In a PG-13 setting I don’t think he can be, really. Without the mutants and other anti-heroes, there isn’t anyone for him to try to bring under the auspices of big government. I mean half the people on his team in the Civil War were outright villains. I also just don’t think movie Tony is as terrible a person as MU Tony.