Maybe it’s appropriate that Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the Emmy-winning writers of an HBO biopic about Peter Sellers, would eventually wind up becoming the go-to guys for Marvel Studios to write the movie adventures of their man-out-of-time WWII hero Captain America. To some, Sellers himself was seen as an actor way ahead of his time, especially with his unforgettable role in Being There. That might seem like a stretch, but before being pulled into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the duo also spent years adapting C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia,” making them more than ready to bring one of Marvel’s more relatable, grounded characters into a world full of billionaire playboys obsessed with reinventing their armor, irradiated scientists with anger issues and Norse Gods from another dimension.
Before Captain America could band together with other Avengers, Markus and McFeely’s screenplay for 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger told the story of how wimpy Steve Rogers was turned into the government’s Super Soldier with the surprising decision to keep 95% of the movie set during WWII. It worked and many moviegoers, whether they were fans of the comics or not, really dug their take on the patriotic hero. So did Marvel Studios, who immediately hired the duo to write a sequel even before “The First Avenger” was released.
With that sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which will be out everywhere sometime in the next 24 hours, the writing duo have upped their game, tackling a fairly dense and complex story involving S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra and a darker side of the U.S. government within the Marvel Cinematic Universe than we’ve seen before. Cap’s now in the present day working with S.H.I.E.L.D. so we get to see more of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, as well as a number of new players including Robert Redford’s Alexander Pierce, Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson aka the high-flyin’ Falcon and of course, there’s the title character, the Winter Soldier, who combines the old with the new to balance things out.
SuperHeroHype got on the phone with the two writers–who have already signed on to write a third Captain America movie–to talk about some of the developments in the new movie and some of what might happen next with Cap following the end of the movie, which ends in a fairly open-ended way. We also talked briefly about the “Agent Carter” pilot they wrote, which hopefully will be picked up by ABC, but more importantly… if the Serpent Squad ever appears in a future Marvel movie, you can all thank or blame us!
You can read the full interview at SuperHeroHype!
