Anthony Mackie Says the New Captain America 'Represents a Lot of Different Things,' But America Isn't One of Them

If you've watched as little as quarter of NFL football over the last couple of weekends, then you've undoubtedly seen this trailer for Captain America: Brave New World. So you're aware that the project is attempting the very tricky maneuver of making a tentpole genre picture about Captain America without actual Captain America. 

Instead, it's going to Anthony Mackie's Falcon taking up the Captain's shield after the events of Avengers: Endgame, in which Steve Rogers decided saving the world once was plenty enough for him. So he went back in time to see about a girl. To relive the life he never got to the first time around. Which a lot of fans took as a pretty big moral conundrum since he spent seven decades letting things like Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of the 1960s, and 9/11 happen. Personally I beg to differ, since the woman he ditched all that heroism for was Hayley Atwell, for whom I'd let the world burn:

Kelsey Mcneal. Shutterstock Images.

Eric Mccandless. Shutterstock Images.

Michael Desmond. Shutterstock Images.

Anyhoo, what you might not now is the production hell this movie has been in for years now. How many times it's had its title changed, gone back in the studio for reshoots, been shown to test audiences who hated it, was sent back for rewrites and reshoots yet again, as the budget has ballooned and the release date has been pushed back. There were reports last year of a frustrated Mackie having to act yet again in a sound stage in front of a green screen for the umpteenth time, blowing up at the director because they're working without a script, and they can't even tell him who's fictional ass he's supposed to be pretend-kicking. 

Another factor you probably are aware of is the general Superhero Movie fatigue. Whereas Disney-Marvel was printing money for the better part of 11 years, Warner Brothers-DC crushed it with Christopher Nolan's epic Dark Knight trilogy, and even burning garbage like The Justice League was turning a profit, the printing press stopped with Endgame. There have been exceptions that managed to turn massive profits. But all were third installments of established franchises: Spiderman, Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool. 

Disney in particular is in desperate need of a win. They've tried several times to find the next, post-Avengers phase of the MCU. And all have failed spectacularly. So the gamble now is that they can take those iconic characters who made them so much money, transfer their powers to some other, lesser side character, and reopen the spigots of the money pipeline. 

This new Captainless Captain film is their latest, best hope. Which is why studio execs are probably having a very bad morning after waking up to this:

Disney investors right now:

To be clear, Anthony Mackie is a good actor. He brought a lot to the table with his portrayal of Falcon in some of the unquestionably best Marvel films. And he's been put in the position of replacing one of the core members of the Avengers franchise is an acting Kobayashi Maru. But holy schniekies, did he ever step on a rake here. 

Maybe he was just trying to sell a movie in a foreign land by pandering to the audience. But in that moment, you've got to understand that "reading the room" doesn't mean who's inside the four walls around you. You're talking to the world. Especially the 330 million potential customers in this corner of the world. The ones who are already turned off to the dreck Disney's been putting out. Canceling their Disney+ subscriptions by the hundreds of thousands. And who see the brand as increasingly toxic, turning out cheap, mass produced, preachy film school dreck like The Marvels, The Eternals and The Acolyte.

More to the point though, you've got to read the zeitgeist. This might have escaped most of the people running the big studios, but American audiences are very much done with being told America is something to be ashamed of. Call us overly naive, but we like to think the country, while imperfect, does represent "honor, dignity and integrity." 

We might be a collection of unsophisticated rubes who fly Old Glory in front of our houses and shed a tear during a military flyover during the National Anthem, but we're unsophisticated rubes who turned Disney and Marvel into the most popular entertainment phenomena of the 21st century. So trying to distance Captain America from America, and make this pop culture icon all about one man's journey is worse than just terrible marketing. It's utterly tone deaf in a way that's only going to destroy an already established brand. Good luck with that.