Will “Captain America” Sequel Return to the 40s?

Even though Captain America has arrived in the 21st Century just in time to join the Avengers at the end of his cinematic debut, we may see his future big screen adventures set during the 1940s if the screenwriters have their way.

“We certainly want at least a portion of the '40's, I think,” co-screenwriter Chris Markus tells PopcornBiz, and his screenwriting partner Stephen McFeely agrees: “The span of the movie is about two or three years, and there's a few times in the film where you jump four months ahead, you jump six months ahead. So we did that with the intention of saying, 'Okay, there are certainly unseen adventures that Captain America went on in that period that if we want to, we can go back and explore later.’”

Still – given that Steve Rogers is but one member of the large, all-star lineup of Avengers and probably won’t have an excess of screen time to bemoan his new time-lost status, the scribes are just as tempted to craft an opportunity to exploit his displaced angst as to return to the flag-waving ‘40s.


“It might be doing a disservice not to address the present day Cap, particularly because so much of the comic book run right now is present day Cap – that ‘man out of time’ is the icon,” admits Markus. “The Captain America that most people know is really from kind of the reboot, when Stan Lee brought him back in '63 and '64, frozen from a block of ice. So his biggest personality trait is that he's this man out of time, and for us, we didn't have the opportunity [to explore that]. This was a guy in the RIGHT time.”

They’re also intrigued by the chance to explore some of the latter-day additions to the Cap mythos, like love interest Sharon Carter (a lookalike relative of the film’s Peggy Carter) and his sidekick The Falcon, one of comics’ first black superheroes.

“I want both of them!” says Markus. “Sharon is meaty, almost to a point where you get a little uncomfortable because her relation to Peggy has shifted over the years, as time has passed. She's the sister, she's the cousin, she's the niece. You have to walk a fine line there because it does seem like you're dating your girlfriend's daughter. Falcon is awesome. We can't play with time so much to have Cap go back to Harlem in the '70's and clean up the streets, but it would be awesome to go straight up, like, 'Shaft' with Cap and the Falcon.”

For the two writers, contributing to the overall tapestry of Marvel’s cinematic universe has had an extra perk in that “we got to read 'Iron Man 2' and 'Thor', and now 'Avengers' before they come out,” says Marcus. “So we know things that no one else knows...I mean, we talked to Joss Whedon a little bit. We didn't have a chance to talk to any of the other writers, but it's mostly just fun and kind of an added bonus to know that your McGuffin [the plot device that motivates the action] is coming from a room that you're going to see in 'Thor' and that one of your characters is the father of the guy in 'Iron Man'. It's not so much a burden as it is this little extra layer of excitement.”

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