Rumours of Spidey joining the MCU went back as far as December 2014 when the Sony Hack revealed emails that then-chairman Amy Pascal was in talks with Marvel Studios about a joint deal where the Wall Crawler would feature in Captain America: Civil War. This was confirmed in early 2015, but of course Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus were writing the script for the movie and needed to know if Parker was coming in or not. So how did they deal with this?
“He was in and out all over the place,” Stephen McFeely noted to Creative Screenwriting. “From the very beginning, we knew if we called something Civil War we were going to have to pay off what we called the ‘splash panel,’ which is that seventeen-minute fight where everyone goes at it. It was incumbent upon us to try to fill that with as many heroes as we could without breaking it or forcing people in. We always had a little recruitment section where Tony would get somebody and Steve would get somebody and the rosters would fill organically. Spider-Man was always our first choice for that because Kevin Feige said to us at one point that there was a chance because he was having conversations [with Sony]. We had him in, and sometimes a month or two later Kevin would come back and say, “No, negotiations are not going quite as well. Don’t plan on him!” I don’t know the exact date when corporate signed contracts with Sony, but it eventually led to some hard and fast choices later on.”
Christopher Markus adds: “In that regard, it was very good that he was in a section where the script would’ve called for somebody there, but there wasn’t necessarily a tremendous amount of quantum mechanics riding on that it had to be Spider-Man. So if we finally didn’t get him, the whole house of cards wouldn’t fall down. It would just mean we would have to come up with a different character to play that function.”
One has to wonder who would have been in Spidey’s position if they couldn’t get the rights to the character.
Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” finds Steve Rogers leading the newly formed team of Avengers in their continued efforts to safeguard humanity. But after another incident involving the Avengers results in collateral damage, political pressure mounts to install a system of accountability, headed by a governing body to oversee and direct the team. The new status quo fractures the Avengers, resulting in two camps—one led by Steve Rogers and his desire for the Avengers to remain free to defend humanity without government interference, and the other following Tony Stark’s surprising decision to support government oversight and accountability.
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Captain America: Civil War sees Anthony and Joe Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) directing a cast that includes Marvel Cinematic Universe veterans Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier), Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch), Paul Bettany (The Vision), Don Cheadle (James Rhondes/War Machine), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Emily VanCamp (Sharon Carter), Frank Grillo (Brock Rumlow/Crossbones) and William Hurt (General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross) alongside new additions Chadwick Boseman (Get on Up) as T’Challa/Black Panther, Daniel Bruhl (Rush) as Baron Zemo, Tom Holland (The Impossible) as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Martin Freeman (Sherlock) as Everett Ross.
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published May 13, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
