Captain America: Civil War has a little bit of everything. All of your favorite Avengers, plus the likes of Black Panther, Ant-Man, and Spider-Man, but if you made it to the theater and have been a follower of the MCU from the start, you may have noticed one key player missing from the board: Nick Fury. Speaking with the LA Times, screenwriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus spoke about his absence:
“We didn’t want him to take one side or the other,” Markus says. “Because that’s not his place in the universe. And then we didn’t want another, ‘Is he still with the government? Is he opposed to the government but supporting the government?’ It got to be the potential for a lot more polemic discussion that the movie did not have room for…He’s the guy who put it together. He’s been the sort of parent figure to the Avengers. Let the parent go away, and see if the kids can handle this. See if the kids can be who they’re supposed to be without that governing voice. Um… and they didn’t do that good of a job.”
Another missing element from the film’s many confrontations was a bout between Captain America and none other than Black Widow, which was originally written but cut from the film.
“[Cap and Black Widow] clearly have a deep relationship even though they’re clearly on opposite sides, and you never know how many times you need to hit that over the course of the movie,” McFeely tells Fandango. “I think it works without this fight, but we certainly didn’t know if it would.”
When asked who won that fight, McFeely replied: “I guess Cap did. Let’s just say he got away in the moment, how about that?”
Captain America: Civil War is playing now in theaters around the world. The film has already brought in over $700 million at the global box office.
