This past week, Captain America: Civil War hit home video, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch it a couple of more times once I got that Blu-ray in my greedy little paws. After having seen it now more times than I care to admit, I’ve come to the conclusion that while it might not be the very best comic book superhero movie ever made, it’s maybe the one that comes closest to really replicating what it feels like to read a really good comic book from Marvel. Plus that airport battle scene is simply nerd-vana. I can watch that on a loop.
But despite being all kinds of awesome, the movie still has some detractors out there. Their main complaint is that none of the main cast are killed off in the movie. All the Avengers make it out alive, although not entirely without injury (I’m looking at you Rhodey).
Well, at a Q&A that came after a screening of the movie in Hollywood this week, an audience member asked about the film’s lack of Avenger casualties. Thanks to the folks at HitFix, we know what Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and directors Joe and Anthony Russo had to say about the whole thing. And, it turns out, they did indeed talk about killing of Captain America, if only for a hot minute, similarly to how Cap died at the end of the comic book Civil War. Here are some of their quotes from the Q&A:
Anthony Russo: We never talked about killing  Cap in this one, right? No.
Joe Russo: We did for a beat. We talk about everything.
Anthony Russo: I think the thing to remember is, we do talk about every possible scenario over and over and over again for months and months and months. We talked about it. But it never made its way into a realistic outline.
Kevin Feige: Well, the ending was always more about fracturing the team completely before getting into Infinity War.
Joe Russo: We talked about lots of potential characters dying at the end of the movie. And we thought that it would undercut what is really the rich tension of the movie, which is this is Kramer vs Kramer. It’s about a divorce. If somebody dies, it would create empathy, which would change and allow for repair, and we didn’t want to do that.
If you ask me, the movie didn’t need any of the Avengers to die to make it resonate, and certainly killing off Cap would have been pointless since there would have been zero way he was going to stay dead. I think the Russo Brothers and Feige made the right call here. Later in the Q&A, Anthony Russo said “the tragedy is the family falls apart. Not that the family falls apart and then somebody dies.”
Do you think Cap or one of the other Avengers should have died? Who would you have picked? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
Image: Marvel Studios
