By: Russ Burlingame on January 14, 2013
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap’s former partner/sidekick appears reinvented as The Winter Soldier when the presumed-dead Bucky Barnes pops back up as a Russian sleeper agent with cyborg parts.
The “presumed-dead” part, though, opened up the role of Cap’s #2, and apparently that’s Anthony Mackie’s to fill, as Falcon.
What’s the appeal of playing a character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Apparently quite a bit, Mackie told Black Film during a Gangster Squad press interview.
“I go see the comic book movie and I have a 3-year-old son and he’s always telling me he wants to be Spider-Man or Captain America. It’s unfair for little black kids not to have a superhero to look up to. When I got the call about the Falcon that was a no-brainer. I feel that this is for a whole generation who has the opportunity to know a superhero like we did. We grew up with Spawn and Meteor Man. Every kid had a pot or can and thought they were Meteor Man, so I’m excited for a bunch of kids to say that I’m the Falcon.”
He added, “The Falcon was a short-lived comic book series. If you look at the time in which they introduced the Falcon and what they were trying to do with him, it was an interesting cool character that wasn’t executed well at all. That’s why when the comic book died, they re-introduced him as a Robin to Captain America’s Batman, just to re-spark the life of the character. It’s one of those things where if you are not a real comic book fan and it was short-lived, you wouldn’t know who he was; whereas Black Panther had a long run with an individual comic book.”
