The Serpent Society’s History with MCU’s Captain America

The Serpent Society finally makes its proper live-action movie debut in Captain America: Brave New World, led by the nefarious Seth Voelker/Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). First appearing in the comics in Captain America #310 in October 1985, the Serpent Society has constantly plagued all iterations of Captain America. It was inevitable this gaggle of snake-oriented baddies would eventually find their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s take on the superhero.

What’s fascinating, though, is that Brave New World is not the first time the Serpent Society has intersected with the MCU’s Captain America mythos. These intersections have just not occurred in movie theaters across the globe. Over a decade before this blockbuster hit multiplexes everywhere, the Serpent Society and the MCU’s Captain America were already intertwined through two very different events occurring in 2014.

WARNING: Spoilers below for Captain America: Brave New World

That Serpent Society Video Game Appearance

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By the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe was really firing on all cylinders in the early 2010s, the age of the video game tie-in to a major motion picture was winding down. Just look at how 2012’s The Avengers had a video game that never saw the light of day. The last vestiges of this phenomenon were tie-in mobile games Marvel released for Phase Two projects like Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This game featured all kinds of non-canonical Marvel baddies showing up to take down Steve Rogers/Captain America, including Sin, Taskmaster, and various Serpent Society members like King Cobra, Diamondback, and Puff Adder.

This wasn’t the most prolific launch for the Serpent Society, especially since The Winter Soldier’s endless discrepancies with the movie it was supposedly based on (namely, how Rogers and Sam Wilson meet) made it apparent that this was a non-canonical lark. More than a decade later, though, it is intriguing to compare this iteration of the Serpent Society to their Brave New World incarnation. Chiefly, the one in the Winter Soldier game unabashedly wears colorful snake-themed costumes from the comics. The drab, grounded aesthetics of the Brave New World costume design is eschewed entirely.

This video game also depicted the Serpent Society as being equally powerful when aligned with other Marvel supervillains like Sin and Taskmaster. In Brave New World, meanwhile, Sidewinder ends up being just a lackey for the Buyer, aka Samuel Sterns/The Leader. His various minions, meanwhile, get taken out with relative ease by Sam Wilson/Captain America. For the big screen, the Serpent Society’s prowess got considerably diminished. Perhaps Sidewinder will at least finally don an outfit reminiscent of those Winter Soldier garbs whenever he fulfills his promise to Wilson about breaking out of prison.

The Fake Serpent Society Movie

A little over six months after that Serpent Society appearance in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier mobile game, this group once again came up in connection to the MCU’s Captain America. This was a very high-profile connection too, occurring during Kevin Feige’s big El Capitan Theatre presentation in October 2014 announcing the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s various Phase Three projects that would be released in 2016 and onward. One of the first productions revealed was the name of the previously untitled third Captain America movie scheduled for May 6, 2016.

That’s when Feige nonchalantly revealed that the title was called Captain America: Serpent Society … or so it seemed. This moniker was actually a placeholder so that Feige could bring out Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., and Chadwick Boseman out at the end of the event to bring the house down with the reveal that Captain America: Civil War would be kicking off summer 2016. That Serpent Society name quickly became a punchline among MCU fans, though for a split second, it seemed plausible as an actual title for a Captain America movie.

After all, this was the year that Marvel Studios turned Rocket Raccoon and Groot into household names with the original Guardians of the Galaxy. The outfit turning its attention to making the Serpent Society big-screen baddies seemed somewhat inevitable. Of course, that never happened, and one of Captain America’s biggest go-to group of foes had to wait more than a decade to finally show up in proper canonical MCU material. Still, these two Serpent Society sightings in 2014 tangentially connected to the franchise’s version of Captain America demonstrate how this gaggle of adversaries is so entrenched in Cap’s lore. They also reflect how Brave New World’s use of Sidewinder and company has been such a long time coming.

Captain America: Brave New World is now playing in theaters.