Batman V Superman Helped To Get Captain America: Civil War Made

Captain America: Civil War is receiving universal praise from the fan community, at least so far. [...]

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Captain America: Civil War is receiving universal praise from the fan community, at least so far. Part of the reason for that is, of course, it seems to be a good film, but more than that it embraces the attitude that rocking the boat can sometimes be a positive thing.

In an interview with THR, Co-Director Joe Russo talked about the change in storytelling approach for Civil War, and why it worked so well.

"Well, it helps that we're working within a very popular genre. But I also think social media has altered viewing habits and tastes. The quality of tentpole movies has gotten very good and very competitive over the last couple years. Because of social media and the discussion that happens there, the audience has gotten a stronger collective sense of taste and you're dead at 6 p.m. on Friday if you didn't make a good movie. And they're starting to champion more radical storytelling."

Russo dives into a bit more about specifically why they decided to do this story, and why it was important to shake things up in their cinematic universe.

Deadpool's a great example of that. I mean, holy shit, $750 million worldwide? For our part, when we finished Winter Soldier two years ago and we were thinking about doing the next one, the only thing that seemed interesting to us was to deconstruct the Marvel Universe — because where else can we go at this point? There have been 11 or 12 movies so far, all with a fairly traditional structure. Our pitch to them was: People will tell you they love chocolate ice cream — until you give it to them five days a week. It's time to give them some rainbow sherbet. Kevin [Feige] is a maverick and he's very sensitive to how people are responding to his content. He said he thought we might be right."

That inkling was solidified when DC and Warner Bros. announced Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice: "And after they announced Batman v. Superman, he said, 'you guys are absolutely right.' We needed to do something challenging with the material or we were going to start to lose the audience."

Captain America: Civil War debuts on May 6th.

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