THE WINTER
SOLDIER.

AN AUDITION THEY HAD NOT LOBBIED FOR

HOW TWO TELEVISION DIRECTORS WON CAPTAIN AMERICA 2

Anthony and Joe Russo arrived at Marvel from television. Their feature credits were the 2002 crime comedy Welcome to Collinwood and 2006’s You, Me and Dupree, and their reputation rested on episodes of Arrested Development and Community. Anthony Russo has said their agent simply called to say they were on a list of directors Marvel wanted to meet about Captain America 2. What followed was, in his words, a process of about two and a half months over four meetings in which they were “basically auditioning for the job.”

The brothers used that time to work the film out before they had it. They came up with new action sequences and character beats, wrote script pages, made storyboards, and cut a mock trailer from shots and sequences in other films that showed Marvel the style they wanted to draw on. By the time they won the job, Anthony said, they knew exactly what they wanted to do with the movie.

A POLITICAL THRILLER GRAFTED ONTO A SUPERHERO MOVIE

WHY THE FILM LOOKS TO THE 1970S, AND WHAT ROBERT REDFORD BROUGHT TO IT

The tone came from Kevin Feige. He pitched the film to writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and producer Nate Moore as a second genre graft: the first Captain America had been a World War II movie grafted onto a superhero movie, and the sequel would do the same with a different kind of story.

“Let’s do a political thriller grafted with a superhero movie.”

Kevin Feige, recalling the pitch to the writers, April 2014

The Russos arrived with the same reference points. Joe Russo has described the structure of Three Days of the Condor as the model: the first ten minutes make Robert Redford as charming as possible, and the rest of the film asks whether that likable man is going to be killed. Their film aims for the same effect with Steve Rogers. The brothers also hid a single Condor reference in the film, a “pause your DVD” Easter egg. Redford, who plays senior S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce, was the obvious casting nod to that tradition. Anthony Russo has said the brothers owe their careers to Redford, since Sundance is how their early work got its exposure.

AN IDEA FEIGE HAD CARRIED SINCE THE FIRST FILM

WHERE THE HYDRA TWIST CAME FROM, AND HOW BUCKY BECAME THE WINTER SOLDIER

The idea that HYDRA had been inside S.H.I.E.L.D. from the beginning belongs to Feige. He has said it was a notion in the back of his head while the studio plotted timelines for the first Captain America film: if the S.S.R. had defeated HYDRA, the United States would plausibly have absorbed its scientists and technology, and some of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s signature equipment could have started as HYDRA’s. The first person he told was Chris Evans, on the last day of shooting The Avengers in Central Park, alongside the plan to adapt Ed Brubaker’s Winter Soldier story and make Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes a very different version of himself.

Brubaker and artist Steve Epting introduced the Winter Soldier in their 2005 relaunch of Captain America, a story built on bringing back Bucky, a character the comics had long treated as permanently dead. The film also introduced Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, the Falcon.

The twist had to be shared with television. When Joss Whedon, then developing the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, learned of the plan and said he wanted to be involved, Feige’s answer was that he did not want to change the film for the show. Whedon agreed they could make it work. The series answered with its own HYDRA episode, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” four days after the film’s US release, a crossover covered in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. entry on this site.

A GREENSCREEN LIFT, A CLEVELAND BRIDGE AND HELICARRIERS TOO LONG FOR THE RIVER

HOW THE ELEVATOR FIGHT, THE BRIDGE AND THE FINALE WERE MADE

Much of the film was shot in Cleveland, the Russos’ home city, which stood in for Washington on many of the large exterior sequences. The finished Washington is partly a composite. A bridge sequence was shot on a Cleveland bridge with fewer lanes than the one in the film, and the effects team extracted Captain America on his bike from that footage and placed him on a completely synthetic Washington bridge.

The elevator fight was also not shot where it appears to be. It was filmed on a locked-off greenscreen set at Marvel Studios, with stunt glass both in and out of place, and Scanline then added the Washington backgrounds and the glass reflections. The visual effects supervisor described the double plane of glass, inside the elevator and outside on the building, as a particular challenge.

Stunt work reached the cast directly. Anthony Mackie has said his first day of filming on the movie was a backward jump off a 30-foot platform while firing weapons, and that he had no rehearsal and no stunt training. “Definitely the hardest day I’ve had,” he said. The finale was largely digital: the three helicarriers were built in effects, and the supervisors noted that at their designed size the carriers were too long for the width of the river, which the effects team had to work around.

THE REWATCH

A RECORD APRIL OPENING, A TAG THAT LOOKS AHEAD TO AGE OF ULTRON, AND THE ROAD TO INFINITY WAR

The mid-credits scene shows Baron Strucker in a HYDRA base holding Loki’s scepter from The Avengers, and ends on the Maximoff twins, later played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The post-credits scene returns to the Smithsonian’s Captain America exhibit, where Bucky Barnes reads about his own past.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened to $95.0 million domestically and finished with $259.8 million in the US and $714.4 million worldwide against a $170 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 90% critics’ score from 310 reviews, with a consensus calling it “suspenseful and politically astute” and “a superior entry in the Avengers canon.” Metacritic’s Metascore is 70 from 48 critic reviews.

The Russos went on to direct Captain America: Civil War and the two-part Infinity War saga. For a first watch, it sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Thor: The Dark World, with the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. crossover best saved for afterward.