Captain America: The Winter Soldier - Top Five Things We Know

Coming on the heels of one of Marvel's most critically-acclaimed but lowest-grossing films, [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Captain America The Winter Solider Comic-Con Exclusive Poster

Coming on the heels of one of Marvel's most critically-acclaimed but lowest-grossing films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier will follow Steve Rogers through a harrowing experience as S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to turn against him and his former sidekick, believed dead for decades, re-emerges as a surprisingly spry assassin with ill intent. The film will be the last solo sequel for a while, as The Avengers 2 wraps up the current phase of operations for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Phase III includes, at a minimum two new solo films and no sequels announced as yet. This film is also a bridge that connects Phase One to Phase Two in a big way, as filmmakers have said that it leads more directly out of the events of Marvel's The Avengers than anything else the studio has released since. What should we be expecting next spring, when the star-spangled Avenger heads to cinemas? We've compiled some of the more credible reports about what's going on.

Captain America the Winter Soldier Falcon

Introducing The Falcon Howard Mackie joins the cast of the Marvel Universe this time around as The Falcon, Captain America's longtime partner in the comics. He's also being billed--at least by Mackie--as Marvel's first black superhero, which is of course true in the comics but forgets all about War Machine/Iron Patriot in the films. Then again, War Machine/Iron Patriot is basically just another guy in an Iron Man suit, whereas they could craft Falcon to be much more his own man in the movies than he is in the comics...

Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes Marvel

Bucky is back, and they kept the cyborg arm Not only is Captain America: The First Avenger and Once Upon a Time star Sebastian Stan returning in this film to reprise his role as Captain America's former (and apparently dead) sidekick Bucky Barnes, but he'll be doing so in a form that's pretty similar to what we see in the comics. With a cybernetic arm, he'll present a kind of metahuman threat in Captain America's fairly straightforwardly military universe--and presumably will be even more unstable once he figures out that he's been brainwashed into working for the bad guys. The arm, of course, will require a little more explaining in the movies than it did in the comics; for years, it was Marvel canon that Bucky's arm was unable to be dislodged from the bomb that everyone thought killed him--but they took him "out" in a different way in the movies.

Batroc the Leaper Kicking Batman For No Reason

Batroc is in it...but not much. Batroc the Leaper will make an appearance in the film, played by MMA personality Georges St. Pierre, but his role only took a few days to shoot him out and it's being widely assumed that he won't be a major player in the story. Maybe setting him up for another film down the line? Still, in a story that appears to be very espionage-driven, a semi-metahuman villain from a foreign nation could prove an interesting character to watch for. Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D.? It seems as though the story has elements of Bob Harras and Paul Neary's Nick Fury Vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. tale in it, as he faces off against his superior officers and other S.H.I.E.L.D. contractors in many of the set photos and video that have leaked out of the fim's shoot. This tracks with what little official information has come out about Robert Redford's character, who is said to be both the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a bad guy. Will this impact Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., assuming it gets a second season? Could it be a way of writing out Jackson's character in case he, like Robert Downey, Jr., doesn't want to stay on indefinitely? Worked on by Man of Steel's Peter Rubin Peter Rubin, who helped design the look of Krypton in Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's just-released Superman reboot, worked as a storyboard artist on the film--although he could tell us almost nothing about the experience when we asked him about it in June. "Well, I wouldn't call the experience I had on Captain America tight-fisted," Rubin told ComicBook.com. "It was certainly secretive. Gosh, you know, I really can't comment on it. I'll tell you I did storyboards for that film so my work for Captain America 2 as an experience was extremely different because I was doing loose guide concepts for Green Lantern, I was doing a cross between concepts and actual designs for Man of Steel and for Captain America I was doing shots—where's the camera going to be, what's Cap doing in this shot, that kind of stuff. I can't really say anything else about Captain America right now—talk to me next year!"

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