Now that Captain America: Civil War is out in the wild, pulling in a strong international haul at the box office in the process, screenwriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus have continued to dissect the intricate layers of Marvel’s grand juggernaut.
From the high octane airport sequence to that Star Wars easter egg, McFeely and Markus’ post-release analysis has run the gamut, and today, the scribes reflected on the characters absent from Civil War.
Speaking to the LA Times, McFeely and Markus’ zeroed in on Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury in particular, essentially revealing that all along the plan had been to leave the former S.H.I.E.L.D. mastermind on the sidelines. Fury may have brought the Avengers together, but he wouldn’t bear witness to their self-destruction.
“We didn’t want him to take one side or the other,” Markus says. “Because that’s not his place in the universe. And then we didn’t want another, ‘Is he still with the government? Is he opposed to the government but supporting the government?’ It got to be the potential for a lot more polemic discussion that the movie did not have room for…He’s the guy who put it together. He’s been the sort of parent figure to the Avengers. Let the parent go away, and see if the kids can handle this. See if the kids can be who they’re supposed to be without that governing voice. Um… and they didn’t do that good of a job.”
At a bum-numbing two-hours-and-thirty-minutes in length, Captain America: Civil War is already a meaty experience, though the writers went on to highlight one brawl in particular that didn’t make the cut. That was, as McFeely reveals, between Cap and Black Widow.
Per Fandango:
“[Cap and Black Widow] clearly have a deep relationship even though they’re clearly on opposite sides, and you never know how many times you need to hit that over the course of the movie. I think it works without this fight, but we certainly didn’t know if it would.”
Captain America: Civil War is in theaters now.
