Black Panther knew the truth about the death of Iron Man’s parents. In The Wakanda Files, Shuri outlines a large chunk of the MCU’s history and the country uncovered the fact that Bucky Barnes ended up murdering Howard and Maria Stark. A casual mention in Iron Man ended up being a bombshell in the third act of Captain America: Civil War. That final secret was enough to drive a lasting rift between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. T’Challa’s motivation in that movie seems a bit clearer with the extended information that he knew the entire story from the word go. However, he didn’t exactly go easy on Iron Man throughout the movie. Letting him know about this small detail could have saved the team a little heartbreak over the course of their next few adventures.
The book reads, “My King, I have returned to Oakland following my investigation of the crash site. It is obvious there was foul play and valuable property was stolen from Stark. Would you like me to continue the investigation?”
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In a previous chat with Vanity Fair, Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely actually admitted that their endings for Captain America and Iron Man were absolutely thought out in 2015. So, the fact that all this information with The Wakanda Files lines up actually makes sense.
“It’s such a leap of faith, right?” McFeely laughed. “We’d only had one movie as a foursome under our belt (when hired for Infinity War and Endgame). We got the job, thought about it all throughout the shooting of Civil War. And then the last four months of 2015, we cracked both those [Avengers] movies. So Tony’s death and Cap’s dance were on three-by-five cards in September of 2015.”
The Russos have had to answer for their choices in Civil War. But, in a previous interview, they clarified that those kinds of visceral fan reactions are what they’re after.
“These things are really important to us and because we have a history with these characters, all of them, I read almost every comic book character you could think of when I was a kid. I have at least several histories of every character,” Joe Russo said. “There’s a deep history that we can draw upon where we had great emotional and strong psychological connection to the characters as a child. We want to reach into that and understand what elementally motivated you to love the character. That’s what we try to bring out in the characters now. There are certain things. We talked about Cap. There are things that bothered me as a kid about him. We tried to correct those things in our interpretation of the character.”
Do you think Iron Man had a right to know before the big reveal? Let us know in the comments!
