Captain America 4 will Have Extensive Re-shoots

Movies

You’re not going to believe it, but a Marvel movie is reportedly in trouble! On this week’s episode of The Hot Mic, Jeff Sneider said that he’s heard from his sources that Captain America: Brave New World, which has completed filming, “did not do great in a test screening” and is losing “three sequences” and filming re-shoots “from January till May or June.” This is the reason it’s being pushed back to 2025, while Deadpool 3, which still has a lot of shooting to do, is scheduled for the summer of 2024. Brave New World – which was previously titled New World Order, but Marvel finally realized the implications of that – is written by Malcolm Spellman and Dalan Musson, two of the writers of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, along with director Julius Onah.

They’re conducting re-shoots for four or five months!? Even if you factor in things like the actors’ availability, that’s a lot. It’s more than Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and supposedly, that entire film was changed in re-shoots. I can make some guesses about what’s going on here (beyond the movie sucking). First, I think Sabra, the Israeli superhero played by Shira Haas, is being cut out of the film; with what’s going on in Israel and Gaza right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Marvel and Disney decided that it’s better not to tread those waters in a comic book movie, especially one that had previously been called New World Order. And with so many characters in the film, it’s easy to imagine her only being around for three scenes.

Second, I think this was probably an obnoxiously political movie that put off the screening audience, and that’s based on it coming from two Falcon and the Winter Soldier writers. That’s doubly true because this is mainly Malcolm Spellman’s baby; Spellman wrote the finale – you know, the one where Sam Wilson makes that dumb, finger-wagging speech about how terrorists are heroes and he has all the answers because of his skin color but also he doesn’t have all the answers but also shut up and do what he says even though he isn’t really saying anything. I find it easy to believe the guy who wrote that scripted a lousy movie. I wonder if Brave New World called Steve Rogers a racist like the show did, or otherwise denigrated him to make Sam Wilson look better; if so, that must have gone over big with the people who saw it.

And that leads to another issue: is this movie, like the show, all about Sam Wilson’s race? Keep in mind that most general audiences haven’t seen the Disney+ Marvel series, so this could have been jarring. In the movies, Sam Wilson was a patriot who believed in helping others, just as he believed in Captain America. On The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, he’s bitter, he thinks America and his best friend Steve Rogers are racist, and he would prefer to help terrorists than the innocent people they kill. It’s a drastically different character, and for the writers, who have probably been insulated from the public’s reaction to that by the ambiguity of streaming numbers (to people who aren’t Disney executives, at least), seeing that the audience liked Sam just the way he was could be a gut punch. Marvel is getting the message – received or not – that audiences don’t want identity politics in their superhero movies, and we could be in the era where they’re trying to change that. For example, The Marvels has clearly been edited all to hell, and it doesn’t have any woke crap in it. I wonder if that’s the focus of the re-shoots in general now: remove the lectures and make these movies fun again.

Two final thoughts:

1. Can you imagine how much money Brave New World will have to make to be profitable after this?

2. I would kill to have been a fly on the wall when Harrison Ford found out he essentially has to film the entire movie again. He’s going to be walking around that set looking like he wants to punch every single person he sees, grumbling like he’s never grumbled before. And I don’t blame him.