Captain America Is No Longer Captain America, Say the Russo Brothers
Ahead of Captain America: Civil War's Blu-Ray release in September, The Huffington Post spoke with directors Joe and Anthony Russo to clear up some questions we all had at the end of the most recent Marvel movie. One of the final scenes of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) is Steve Rogers putting down his shield, which made a lot of us wonder if that means he’s abandoning his superhero alter-ego. Joe Russo’s response:
I think him dropping that shield is him letting go of that identity. [It’s] him admitting that certainly the identity of Captain America was in conflict with the very personal choice that he was making.
Cap will be back, though, in one form or another. One of the reasons he wasn’t killed off at the end of Civil War is because the Avengers need him to fight “the big purple guy,” according to Christopher Markus, one of the writers of the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War two-parter. The purple guy is, of course, Thanos, who’s been hinted at in the MCU since the post-credits scene in The Avengers, and is integral to the plot of Infinity War.
If Steve Rogers isn’t Cap anymore, he could take up the moniker Nomad, his Nixon-era identity during the character’s short disillusionment with the U.S. government. In the MCU, Rogers lost his faith in the government once before, when he figured out most of S.H.I.E.L.D. was controlled by Nazi terrorist organization HYDRA in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So a possible stint as Nomad in the next few Avengers films might not be that big of a stretch.
You can pick up Captain America: Civil War on digital on September 2, and on Blu-ray and DVD on September 13.