In news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, Deadline reports that Anthony Mackie has signed a deal to star in the upcoming fourth Captain America movie.
Mackie headlined Disney+’s recent live-action series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which picked up six months after the events of Avengers: Endgame (in which Steve Rogers stepped down from the title) and saw Sam Wilson (Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) dealing with a changed world in which the role of Captain America wasn’t clear. The US government selects their own replacement after Sam rejects the mantle bequeathed by Rogers—a violent special forces soldier named John Walker (Wyatt Russell) who becomes the new Captain America. After things go wrong, Wilson ends up formally picking up the shield.
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After the series ended back in April, word broke that Marvel had put Captain America 4 into development, with series showrunner Malcom Spellman and writer Dalan Musson tapped to write the screenplay. Given the events of the series, it wasn’t a surprise that Marvel would seek to relaunch the Captain America story arc with Mackie, and now that the actor has apparently signed onto the film, it looks as though the film is moving ahead. According to Deadline, Marvel hasn’t lined up a director for the project yet, and there’s no word on whether Stan or any other cast members from the series are set to join him.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was one of the earlier projects in Marvel’s “Phase Four,” and it’s joined by many more: the recently-released Black Widow, WandaVision, and Loki, as well as a slew of forthcoming shows and movies set to hit theaters and Disney+ soon.
There’s no word on when this particular project will materialize, but given that packed slate, it seems likely that it’ll be a couple of years before we see Sam Wilson taking flight again. As to what the film will be about, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier did leave behind plenty of threads that the film could pull on, ranging from the fate of Walker (now as U.S. Agent), Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and Emily Van Camp’s Sharon Carter-turned-Power Broker.
