The Problem With War

With all due respects to the upcoming Batman vs Superman movie, now that Deadpool has been released the next movie with the biggest amount of hype upcoming is Captain America: Civil War. As more and more trailers are premiered and information is leaked, people are getting more and more excited. People were stoked for their first glimpse of the Black Panther on the big screen and there’s click-bait articles everywhere about Spider-man and what his costume will look like.
I mean, how can you not be excited with just the glimpses we’ve seen of Iron Man and Captain America slugging it out? It’s everything we’ve ever really wanted to see.
The Marvel machines is great at creating hype and turning out good movies. The Iron Man and Thor sequels weren’t especially amazing but they were far from bad movies. The second Captain America is arguably the best superhero movie ever made. That’s not even mentioning how awesome Guardians of the Galaxy was. But with Civil War Marvel might be painting themselves into a corner.
I wasn’t really into comics when the first Civil War storyline came out. I knew of it and knew it was superheroes fighting against superheroes. What I did know was the result of the war. Everyone knew because it was literally front page news and I’m not talking about comics news. I specifically remember seeing it on the front pages of websites like Yahoo and CNN. Kind of a big deal. Everyone knew that the Civil War lead to Captain America being assassinated.
So what does Marvel do now?
Do they follow the path of the comics and end the movie with Steve Rogers being shot dead on the steps of the capitol building and following the story arc of the comics? Or will Rogers survive as the movies take a different direction?
Either way Marvel is going to lose.
Let’s say they kill off Rogers. There’s going to be a large portion of the population who isn’t going to see this coming. It was more than 10 years ago that Rogers was killed off and it was on the front pages. Those people are going to be blown away. The rest of the people though… they’re going to complain that it was predictable. They’re going to have seen it coming and not been surprised. Not only that, those same people won’t feel the true impact of the death of Steve Rogers because they’re going to be the true fans. They’re going to know that he and just about every hero have died and been resurrected at least once.
Then there’s the flip side of this coin. If they don’t end with the corpse of Rogers, people are going to be mad. The most iconic image of the original Civil War is that shot of Rogers in uniform shot and bleeding out on the steps. How can you even evoke the name of Civil War and then deprive people of the most moving part? Heroes fighting against one another was big but nothing have a bigger impact across the world than Captain America dying.
The worst thing Marvel could do would be to do both.
Have one of those sequences of events where Captain America is shot and appears to be dead but then reveal that he was expecting it and properly armored. That’d probably anger both sides because it would trivialize the entire moment.
If they had Cap get shot for real and then not make a recovery until midway through the next Avengers movie with Bucky trying to fill his shoes until then, I think that’d work. That way you don’t have to sacrifice Chris Evans but can still give the fans what they want. In fact they could even have some fun with it. Make some nod towards people seeming to die and then return a lot. It could work.
Maybe it will be Cap dead, maybe it will be Bucky being his decoy or maybe it will be someone else but someone needs to actually die in this movie. There can’t be a dozen of Earth’s mightiest heroes going at each other’s throats without someone paying the ultimate price. It doesn’t have to be Cap but if no one dies, Marvel will have missed a chance to really make a statement.