STEVE ROGERS MAY be gone (or, at the very least, retired, spending his days watching The Chase), but the Captain America business is still going strong. That’s the message of next February’s Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth film in the franchise, but crucially, the first to feature Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson as the new Cap. “It’s really his coming-out show,” director Julius Onah tells Empire. “It’s about putting him through the paces.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up, Wilson was handed the shield by an aged Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) at the end of Avengers: Endgame in 2019. However, it took six episodes of Disney+ show The Falcon And The Winter Soldier before Sam fully embraced his new identity. The final title card of that show read simply, ‘Captain America And The Winter Soldier’. “Sam has finally embraced the idea of being Captain America,” says producer Nate Moore. “He’s taken on the Stars &Stripes. He’s made it very public. But now what? Where does he go from there?”
Opposite the pointy end of Harrison Ford’s finger, that’s where. Brave New World throws Sam into the middle of a complicated relationship with the President Of The United States, General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, the anti-heroic architect of the Sokovia Accords and long-time thorn in the Avengers’ sides. “The plan was always to make Ross the president,” says Moore of the character who had been played by William Hurt since the dawn of the MCU. Hurt’s death in 2022 prompted a decision to recast the role with Ford. “We were very sad when William Hurt passed, because he was very excited about the movie,” Moore reflects. “But we could not be luckier to have Harrison Ford stepping into those shoes and embracing what Bill did in the previous films, but taking the character in a new direction.”