Russo Brothers Say CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 Will Wrap Up Steve Rogers' Storyline

Captain America 3 is almost two full years away, and while we don’t know a ton about the project yet, we do know that it is the last Captain America standalone that Chris Evans is on contract for. How that will affect the story is anyone’s guess. Will it wrap things up for him the way Iron Man 3 wrapped things up for Tony Stark? Or will he pass the shield to one of the possible Captain Americas waiting in the wings? Maybe it will be like the series finale of Buffy and he will pass the shield to both of them. That’s something no one would see coming. Joe and Anthony Russo have been making the rounds promoting the Blu-ray release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and they’ve been teasing us with bits of info about what we can expect from the third chapter of the Captain America saga.

It sounds like they are definitely going to wrap things up for Steve Rogers. Speaking to MTV, Anthony Russo said, “[Whether this is the end] is a hard question to answer because it gets to the specific of where the narratives are going. I will say this: yes, for satisfying storytelling, you want a beginning, middle and end. That’s the natural arc that we all thrive off of in narrative.”

That sounds like Captain America is going to follow the Iron Man model — having an individual character arc trilogy plus appearances in Avengers team ups. But unlike Iron Man, there is precedent for the shield to pass to another character, either Bucky Barnes or Falcon.

“The great thing about the Marvel universe, just like the publishing, it’s a very vast, inter-connected universe, where characters will have their rise and fall, so to speak, and hand off to other characters. As the cinematic universe moves forward, you may start to see the cinematic universe adopt that same pattern, as the publishing has, where there’s closure with some characters and new beginnings with other characters. How those hand-offs are made is always part of the fun.”

So it sounds like they will at least leave it open to hand things off to another character, but who will it be? Since Bucky is still the Winter Soldier, wandering around doing who knows what, Sam Wilson/Falcon seems like the obvious choice, but the Russos told Collider that Cap 3 will address Bucky’s situation. Joe said,

“Philosophical questions that we would want to deal with in Cap 3 would be, you know, is he redeemable? Is he the worst assassin we’ve ever seen or is he the longest suffering POW? Where does he live now? Does he ever regain his memories?… If he doesn’t regain his memories, can you call him Bucky Barnes or is he somebody new? So it’s a really fascinating character to play with.”

It also sounds like all those questions will be wrapped up in Cap 3. “We’ve called it a two-parter.”

They also told Collider that the first draft of the script is done, and that it revolves around an idea from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, which is interesting, especially given what came next. Joe said, “Usually when Kevin has an idea in his head, it’s a big idea that affects the whole universe.” Then Anthony chimed in, “For instance the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. That would be an example of a big idea coming from Kevin that a movie then has to wrap itself around.”

What is this big idea? And what will it change for the MCU this time? They aren’t looking too far ahead. Anthony said, “even though there’s sort of a grand plan of things, Kevin Feige also has this awesome attitude of one movie at a time, which I think is very healthy, not to get too far ahead of yourself.”