When superheroes face off against one another, you'd think that there would be some deaths along the way. Despite all of outright damage and destruction in Captain America: Civil War, the movie didn't feature any hero deaths… Which is a bit surprising because the movie pits the Avengers against one another.
Apparently, a number of heroes could have died, including Captain America, but no one did. Civil War directors Anthony and Joe Russo have finally detailed why no one died. According to the Russo brothers, a death would have taken away from the true tragedy that was the team falling apart.
They didn't want someone's death to outshine the bigger picture:
Anthony Russo: We never talked about killing Cap in this one, right? no.
Joe Russo: We did for a beat. We talk about everything.
Anthony Russo: I think the thing to remember is, we do talk about every possible scenario over and over and over again for months and months and months. We talked about it. But it never made its way into a realistic outline.
Kevin Feige: Well, the ending was always more about fracturing the team completely before getting into Infinity War.
Joe Russo: We talked about lots of potential characters dying at the end of the movie. And we thought that it would undercut what is really the rich tension of the movie, which is this is Kramer vs Kramer. It’s about a divorce. If somebody dies, it would create empathy, which would change and allow for repair, and we didn’t want to do that.
Kevin Feige: In the amazing comic book story, which certainly the conceit of this movie is based on and some of the specifics — during their big battle, which has a hundred times as many characters, a character dies. And we talked about that for a while. And, ultimately, we thought what happened to Rhodey would be enough of a downer.
Anthony Russo: The tragedy is the family falls apart. Not that the family falls apart and then somebody dies.
What's interesting about the quotes is the very first statement from Anthony Russo, "We never talked about killing Cap in this one, right?" This might imply that Cap will die in the coming Marvel films or that the Russo brother really, really want to kill him off.
What would we do then?
[HitFix]
