While the film isn’t universally beloved as perhaps “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” the follow-up film from The Russo Brothers, “Captain America: Civil War,” is often seen as top-tier Marvel Studios. And a large part of that reasoning is the way the film ended, with Captain America and Iron Man having a brutal fight that fractured their friendship, and the Avengers, for years. Well, there was a point in time when the massive battle shown on-screen was preceded by a huge behind-the-scenes disagreement that threatened to derail the film and fracture Marvel as a company.
In the new book, “The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe” (via /Film), the rumored behind-the-scenes friction between Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Marvel’s Creative Committee came to a breaking point in 2015, when the ending of “Captain America: Civil War” was being fleshed out. And the fallout of this disagreement altered the way Marvel Studios makes films since.
For those unaware, up until 2015, Marvel Studios was still under the umbrella of its parent company, Marvel, led by CEO Ike Perlmutter. The executive created a group called the Marvel Creative Committee, made up of Marvel Comics folks such as Brian Michael Bendis, Dan Buckley, and Joe Quesada, along with Perlmutter himself and Marvel Entertainment president Alan Fine. Reports of friction between Kevin Feige and the Marvel Creative Committee have floated around for years, with rumors of the MCC providing bad ideas and terrible notes, often trying to change the films that Feige was producing. This all came to an end during “Captain America: Civil War,” where it is now revealed that the MCC wanted to drastically change the ending of the film, and the Russo Brothers and Kevin Feige were not budging.
According to the new ‘Story of Marvel Studios’ book, the Marvel Creative Committee wanted to end ‘Civil War’ with a battle where Iron Man and Captain America put their differences aside and fight super soldiers on a submarine. This would have put a nice happy bow on the story, and it would have destroyed the original ending that left Iron Man and Captain America bleeding after beating the hell out of each other and destroying their friendship.
“We kept saying, ‘There’s nothing interesting about that film. We’re not here to make that movie,’” said Joe Russo. “We’re not interested in telling another superhero story.'”
He added, “‘Civil War’ started a civil war in Marvel. But when we drew the line in the sand, it became a moment where that company was either going to slowly bend back toward where it had come from, or it was gonna slowly start to bend toward new territory.”
As we now know, Disney ended up taking the side of Kevin Feige and the Russos, and thus, formally ended the creative partnership between Marvel Studios and Marvel Entertainment. From then on, starting with “Captain America: Civil War,” Feige was given the autonomy to make the films he wanted to make without consulting the Marvel Creative Committee or Ike Perlmutter. And, when you look at the films that were released after that, you really do see how Feige continued to take bigger and bigger swings, often creating some of the best films in the MCU.