Captain America: Civil War Updates

Captain America: Civil Waris bound to be a movie with a serious cast of characters. Think of it as Avengers 2.5. It's so big that they've had to bring Robert Downey Jr. in to play Tony Stark (and really, would anyone be surprised if he doesn't end up in armor for at least one scene?). But who else? The comic book premise of Marvel's Civil War involved a far-reaching superhuman registration act, which should allow for plenty of costumed characters to make the scene.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo promised, at the very least, we'll see some favorites from Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They confirmed that in addition to the "untidy" fallout of the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark battle, that Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan will return as Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, respectively. This might be the first official confirmation we've had that they're both in, as we already knew Anthony Mackie was in as Falcon. Those of you who had Black Widow in your Avengers: Age of Ultron death pool have lost. Thanks to Comic Book Moviefor this catch.

Meanwhile, in a chat with IGN, co-writer Stephen McFeely admitted that managing a story of this scale is challenging:

"it’s a challenge to do it and make sure that all the characters that we’ve established, and everyone’s established in the MCU are serviced and sound correct, right? Because there’s a difference between the characters in Civil War, which was written in 2006, 2007. The MCU doesn’t exist [when it was written]. There isn’t a Robert Downey Jr. or Chris Evans who has helped create the character so we need to make sure that that template gets adjusted and what have you in order to make sure it services these characters and not just sort of rip off their parts and make them look like them."

I wrote more about Captain America: Civil War and the future of the Marvel Universe here. It opens on May 6th, 2016.