The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Anthony Mackie Says Sam Wilson Gets Iron Man-Type Upgrade

Sam Wilson is getting an Iron Man-style upgrade in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Anthony Mackie returns to play Sam in Marvel Studio’s second Disney+ streaming series. The show finds The Falcon struggling to live up to Captain America’s mantle after Steve Rogers bequeathed the star-spangled shied to him in Avengers: Endgame. In a feature in Disney’s D23 Magazine‘s latest issue, Mackie explains that Mackie is taking fewer chances with his life after having been “blipped” out of existence and then restored during Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. That means taking a page out of Tony Stark’s book and improving his Falcon suit.

“The wings have become much more pliable, much more dynamic,” Mackie says (via The Direct). “He’s much more of a winged force. Coming out of Endgame and being blipped out and blipped back in, it seems this time around, he really appreciates being alive. He’s been even more ‘Tony Starkerized’ than before.”

In a previous interview, Mackie explained that Sam’s claim to the Captain America legacy would not go unchallenged. “See, at the end of Endgame, Sam didn’t accept the shield. If you remember, he told Steve [Rogers], ‘It doesn’t feel right because the shield is yours.’ So, the show is a long way of figuring around who’s gonna be Captain America,” Mackie said during an episode of The Rich Eisen Show. “Where’s the shield gonna end up. And, who is going to be Captain America, and is that moniker going to come back. Is someone going to hold that moniker again?”

Also, Sam was hardly the only person affected by Thanos’s blip. That’s another subject that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will dive into, with showrunner Malcolm Spellman previously drawing parallels between the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the real-world pandemic.

“There’s no hiding from the fact that four billion people in the MCU disappeared for five years, and then came back. And our show picks up from there and directly talks about what the world feels like to be in flux and dealing with one global issue,” Spellman told SFX Magazine. “When the pandemic hits, and the entire planet has to come together and deal with it, the synergy there is perfect.”

Are you excited to watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Let us know how you feel about it in the comments section. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier streams on Disney+ starting March 19th. You can watch it right here.

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