The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere addressed a major question MCU fans have been wondering about for years: do the Avengers actually get paid for saving the planet? The opening episode of the Disney Plus show faced this issue head on, when Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson and his sister attempted to take out a bank loan but were denied. It turns out that, as Sam put it, the heroes live on “a tremendous amount of goodwill” from grateful folks they’ve saved.
This caused a bit of a stir on social media, as fans blasted billionaire Tony Stark (geez people, give the dead guy a break) for not handing out hefty paychecks to his fellow Avengers. And in a new interview with TVLine, Falcon actor Mackie admitted that he always assumed Iron Man was funding the team members, given his enormous wealth.
“It’s interesting… I always ask the question: ‘When the Avengers show up, they destroy whole cities and crush people, and what do they do for a living? Where does their money come from?’ I always believed it was Tony Stark because, obviously, he owns an Audi dealership somewhere.”
The star went on to clarify, however, that he thinks the working-class heroes who need to make a living – unlike the richer ones such as, say, Doctor Strange and Black Panther – are able to subsist on “odd jobs,” primarily being employed through the government.
“I think they do it for the betterment of the world, for saving people’s lives. They have their ins and outs, their odd jobs to make sure that they’re taken care of — government sponsorship, funding, government housing.”
This is pretty much what we saw in the Falcon premiere. The episode’s opening minutes made clear that Sam has been accepting various government contracts since he was reconstituted after The Blip, pulling on his old contacts in the Air Force. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), meanwhile, is living a fairly low-key life in NYC, focusing on righting his past wrongs. It’d be interesting to explore his financial situation as well, though, seeing as he’s 100 years old.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuts its second episode this Friday, March 26th on Disney Plus.
