With Iron Man 3 set to launch Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in just a few short weeks, we’ve been inundated lately with promotional material for Robert Downey Jr.’s third solo adventure, but of course Marvel Studios has plenty of other movies on its upcoming slate, including a trio of sequels in Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Avengers 2. Speaking to /Film, the screenwriting team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Captain America: The First Avengers, Pain & Gain) have offered a little distraction from all things Iron Man by dropping a few details about the next outings for Thor and Captain America, as well as commenting on how the sequels fit into the scheme of things on the road to the second gathering of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
“Cap is much more about realism [than Thor]. They’re tonally quite different genres, almost, so things get a lot more way out in Thor so the chance of tonal overlap is pretty slim,” stated Markus, with Feely then going on to explain how The Winter Soldier differs from their first Captain America script: ” It’ll feel like a different genre, we’ll can say that. We’re very proud of the first one because it was our love letter, and Joe Johnson’s love letter, to Indiana Jones, so it had that Forties vibe to it. This is much more of a modern conspiracy political thriller. So it’s a fast ride. The action will fell commensurate. You’ll see Cap fight in a way that you have never seen before, or at least not for him. The DNA is the same, but the animal is different.”
McFeely went on to touch upon November’s Thor: The Dark World and their contributions to the script: “To be honest, we don’t know who’s gonna get credit on that movie. There are a lot of people who contributed to it so it may not be us, we don’t know. We’re inheriting that story so we didn’t come up with the story for Thor 2. We just came in and said ‘How can we tell this better and differently?’ So your question doesn’t really come up to us. We say ‘Here’s the problem Thor is dealing with. These are the people and this is the plot. How do we balance character and plot efficiently here?’ And we do the same thing with Cap, but in that case we’re just on it for much longer.”
“[Kevin Feige] is the dungeon master, so if there’s something we really need to know, he’ll tell us, but he doesn’t steer us,” explained McFeely with regards to the wider implications of each movie on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. “With rare exceptions does he say ‘We can’t do that because of this next movie.’ More often than not he’ll say ‘Let’s get this movie right and whatever falls out after that,we’ll address in the next movie. We’ll make sure that we don’t steer that movie in the wrong direction.”
“More often than not, when you’re thing of the movies as a whole, it’s ‘What do you want the state of the world to be when Avengers 2 kicks off?’ Markus elaborated. “It’s never like, Cap has to put down a briefcase so the Hulk can pick it up. It’s never that specific. It’s sort of like, “Where do you want loyalties to lie when that movie opens?”
Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets underway this month (or next, if you’re in the States) with the release of Iron Man 3, followed by Thor: The Dark World in November, Captain America: The Winter Solider and Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, and The Avengers 2 in 2015.
Originally published April 12, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
