Looking Back At Captain America: Civil War
Before a new release in a franchise, I like to go back and review the major entries relevant to what's coming. With Captain America: Brave New World arriving in a little over a month, I went back to watch Captain America: Civil War again because I hadn't seen it in quite some time and I think, especially with the eight years of hindsight, this might be the single most important movie in the MCU.
From a narrative standpoint, this movie does a lot to set the stage for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, even beyond the characters it introduces. Yes, it formally brings Black Panther and Spider-Man into the fold but the more important thing it does is fracture the team so they aren't together when Thanos invades. Could they have beaten him back when he just had four stones? Maybe, but it would have been tough. Either way, the plot of both Infinity War and Endgame only happens because the Avengers are broken up, forcing them onto the defensive.
The movie beyond that works because it is fundamentally a grounded story. It's a dispute over how those with great power can use them without any oversight, but at the same time it is a grounded, personal, and intimate fight between two people over a secret that one kept from the other. The stakes for the world are massive, but the stakes for the characters are world-shattering on a personal level.
For the studio as a whole, this movie was a major turning point for the MCU because it started their string of hits that characterized the lead-in to Infinity War and Endgame. Realistically this mostly started with The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy but the back-to-back soft reception to Age of Ultron and Ant-Man dulled some of the impact. This was a return to form and, because it was functionally Avengers 2.5, served as a kind of template for how viewers could expect to see these characters handled under the Russo Brothers directing and the writing combo of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
But at the end of the day, what does revisiting Captain America: Civil War tell us about where these movies could go in the future? I think Captain America: Brave New World is going to be either Civil War or Iron Man 2. What I mean by that is that it will either the movie that sets things in motion in advance of Doomsday (not building towards the movie plot-wise but public perception-wise) or it will be a mostly serviceable film that does more for worldbuilding than it does for telling a story about the characters in the movie itself. Broadly for both the MCU and other franchises, movies that fall into the Iron Man 2 region tend to be worse than movies that focus on character.
Captain America: Civil War is available to stream on Disney+.
Captain America: Brave New World will be released theatrically on February 14th, 2025
