Long before they sunk their teeth into Avengers: Infinity War, a film that far exceeds anything else on the MCU roster in terms of scale, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely got their Marvel break on Captain America: The First Avenger.
Set during the throes of World War I, the origins movie is all about introducing Chris Evans as the star-spangled patriot, and while it initially took some time to crack The First Avenger‘s story, it wasn’t long before Markus and McFeely were in possession of a screenplay for the fifth installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
That’s something that the creative duo reflected on during a recent appearance on Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin’s podcast, Fat Man on Batman, with Stephen McFeely admitting that:
It took us a little while, but we figured out you don’t need to give Captain America a ‘Dark Knight’ of a soul, particularly in his origin movie. Cap is going to be steady, and he’s going to change the world around him, so you don’t want a movie that feels like it’s made in the ’40s, but it’s going to have a lot to do with the ’40s because it feels like a Gary Cooper movie in a lot of ways.
Once we landed on that, that means you tell a very specific origin story. And again, we’re given a lot in that movie. [Marvel Studios] gave us Red Skull, they handed us a cosmic cube, and we knew we had to put him in the ice at the end. So we knew we had a lot of markers. What’s up to us is that you know his character and structure.
Story elements like the cosmic cube (i.e. Space Stone) and Red Skul were later woven into the fabric of Avengers: Infinity War, and it’s a credit to Markus and McFeely that, even after all these years, the MCU still feels like a cohesive unit.
In closing, Markus elaborated on the duo’s approach to The First Avenger:
We had actually been talking about whether you could make a superhero period movie that took place when these characters actually came out – like a 1932 Batman. And then we found out that Marvel wanted to do a period [Captain America] movie. We would have never gone after a modern-day Cap movie, because it’s ridiculous.
Next up for Cap and his depleted team is the launch of Avengers 4 in 2019. And we can hardly wait.
