'Super Troopers 3' Is Stealing Its Title From Marvel Cinematic Universe

The second Super Troopers film is new in theaters, but Broken Lizard is already eyeing a third one -- one that will take its name from the second Captain America film.

...Yes, really.

The third installment in the Super Troopers franchise will apparently be titled Super Troopers: Winter Soldiers, a nod to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

"We are writing Super Troopers 3: Winter Soldiers right now," said Jay Chandrasekhar, group member and director of most of the Broken Lizard films.

When The Huffington Post, who first reported the title, asked him to confirm he was not joking, he did so.

In the Marvel canon, the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes, Captain America's long-thought-dead sidekick, who turned out to have been a brainwashed Soviet agent for decades before Captain America managed to discover him and bring him back to his right mind.

The Winter Soldier twist on Bucky was created by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting, who brought Bucky back in Captain America #1 in 2005. Prior to the Winter Soldier revelation, Bucky was one of only a small handful of characters in comics thought to be sacred cows who would remain dead. Others included Jason Todd (who has since been revived), Gwen Stacy (it's complicated), and Spider-Man's Uncle Ben.

The phrase "winter soldier" has a long and controversial history. A documentary about Vietnam's "winter soldiers" was made before Marvel ever got around to the phrase, and the idea itself is a riff on the notion of "summer soldiers," decried by Thomas Payne in 1776 for abandoning the union when things got rough in the winter.

The second Super Troopers movie was crowdfunded via IndieGoGo after Broken Lizard could not convince a studio to take a chance on it. They raised around $4.5 million on the crowdfunding site from fans eager to see a follow-up to the cult 2001 comedy, then used that money to create a film that has earned north of $31 million already.

While Winter Soldier is not one of the most commercially successful films in Marvel's library, many "serious" critics maintain that it cinematically the best-made of Marvel's movies. It set up plot points that paid off in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.