When Captain America: Civil War was released in theaters in 2016, the sequel doubled as a momentous introduction to the MCU for two massive Marvel superheroes: Black Panther and Spider-Man. More than eight years later, another Captain America film is here to usher in a new era for the franchise, as Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson steps into the starring role once held by Chris Evans. And Marvel Studios is hoping that the latest sequel can serve a similar purpose in paving the way for future titles.
On Friday, Captain America: Brave New World will become the first of three feature films set to be released by Marvel Studios this year. Directed by Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox), Brave New World is the first true MCU movie since The Marvels flopped at the box office in November 2023. (Last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine was technically part of the MCU, but it was more of an extension of 20th Century Fox’s Marvel universe than it was a film set in the familiar MCU that audiences know and—used to, at least—love.) And it’s a crucial stepping stone for Marvel as Phase 5 nears its finish, setting up the next Avengers crossover event in Phase 6.
While Brave New World is first and foremost a Captain America sequel, the film also has connections to a number of other MCU projects—some of which are rather surprising. So ahead of its release, let’s take a look back at three of the most important predecessors to remember: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, The Incredible Hulk, and Eternals.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is effectively a Captain America sequel; the end credits for the finale of the 2021 miniseries even alter the show’s title to be Captain America and the Winter Soldier. The six-episode series follows Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes as they—and the rest of the world—adapt to life without Captain America after his retirement at the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame. For Wilson, that means initially denying Steve Rogers’s final request to take up the mantle in his place, until Sam is ready to embrace the responsibility of becoming the patriotic protector and symbol for the country. Barnes’s journey is one of healing, as he learns to forgive himself for his dark past as the brainwashed Soviet assassin known as the Winter Soldier.
Perhaps more than anything, the series is Marvel’s attempt to explore race in America, and the political landscape of a world that’s still recovering from the Snap that caused half of Earth’s population to vanish, only for it to return five years later. Before Wilson becomes Captain America in earnest toward the end of the season, he first has to watch Cap’s iconic shield be handed to John Walker, whose impressive military résumé is a less important qualification for the lofty superhero title than his physical appearance as a white man with blond hair and blue eyes. During Wilson’s journey, he meets Isaiah Bradley, a forgotten super soldier in the U.S. Army in the 1950s. Bradley’s story plays an important part in the way Wilson views the role of Captain America, and who’s allowed to have it.
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Rather than honoring Bradley as the hero he was after the war, the U.S. government chose to imprison him for 30 years, performing experiments on him all the while. Bradley would have been hailed as the next Steve Rogers had he looked anything like him, but since he was Black, he was hidden away, erased from the country’s history.
With its exploration of race and critiques of American imperialism, set against a geopolitical conflict, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier bit off way more than it could chew in the span of six episodes. With the exception of Secret Invasion, it may be the messiest and most uneven series that Marvel Studios has produced for Disney+. And, for better or worse, Brave New World is maintaining some continuity from the show’s creative team, as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier creator Malcolm Spellman returns to write alongside Rob Edwards, Dalan Musson, Peter Glanz, and Onah. On screen, the film will also feature the returns of Bradley (Carl Lumbly) and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force who was teased in the series as the MCU’s next Falcon.
As Brave New World builds on the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it will also become the first MCU movie to serve as a direct sequel to one of Marvel’s Disney+ series. That narrative handoff between mediums was a little too tricky for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which worked in plotlines from WandaVision, but Brave New World will be an even better test of the studio’s capacity to navigate this type of cross-pollination.
The Incredible Hulk
It’s been more than 16 years since The Incredible Hulk, just the second film in the MCU, was released in theaters. The Avengers were still several years from assembling, and Dr. Bruce Banner was played by Edward Norton. Since then, a lot has changed for Marvel Studios and its cinematic universe. Yet the studio is still getting plenty of mileage out of the 2008 movie.
Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky made a pair of surprise appearances in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and 2022’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Now, several other key characters from The Incredible Hulk are set to return in Captain America: Brave New World. Chief among them is Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who has put together quite the résumé in the MCU.
In The Incredible Hulk, Ross is the lieutenant general of the United States military. He recruits Banner to develop a way to immunize soldiers against gamma radiation, but the scientist doesn’t realize that he’s really being used to essentially recreate the super soldier serum that turned skinny Steve Rogers into Captain America. Of course, the experiments go awry and Banner turns himself into the Hulk instead—an accident that Ross wants to turn into a weapon. When Banner goes on the run, Ross tries to hunt him down, until Thunderbolt gets desperate enough to lead Blonsky down the path to becoming the Abomination. Despite being about as responsible for the subsequent destruction of Harlem as Blonsky, Ross somehow manages to land a job as the Secretary of State by the time he makes his next appearance in Captain America: Civil War.
In Civil War, Ross reveals himself to be a key proponent of the Sokovia Accords, a piece of legislation that increased government control over superheroes in order to hold them accountable. As a result, Ross plays a major role in pitting the Avengers against each other.
In other words, Ross has been failing upward for a long time. And in Captain America: Brave New World, the guy is now the President of the United States. With Harrison Ford stepping into the role previously played by the late William Hurt, Ross is also set to become the same living weapon that he spent years trying to acquire, just in a different colorway: the Red Hulk.
When Ford was asked by Variety about the motion-capture work that was required for him to become the Red Hulk, the 82-year-old actor gave the exact kind of response you’d probably imagine. “What did it take? It took not caring,” Ford quipped. “It took being an idiot for money, which I’ve done before. I don’t mean to disparage it. I’m just saying you have to do certain things that normally your mother would not want you to do—or your acting coach, if you had one. But it’s fun, and I enjoyed it.”
While Thunderbolt may be the headliner, he’s not the only returning attraction from The Incredible Hulk. Thunderbolt’s daughter Betty (Liv Tyler) and Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) are both back in the MCU for the first time since that 2008 film, with the original actors reprising their roles. In The Incredible Hulk, Tyler’s Betty Ross was a cellular biologist and Bruce’s girlfriend, who worked together with Banner in the experiments that turned him into the Hulk. When he fled, she moved on to become a college professor and started dating a “head shrink” played by Modern Family’s Ty Burrell. But she dropped Phil Dunphy with the quickness when Bruce—anger issues and all—walked back into her life. Betty became a fugitive with Banner and stuck with him until the end (of the film), losing Bruce again in the aftermath of his destructive duel with the Abomination.
Despite the long passage of time between Betty’s appearances, Onah said it was a “no-brainer” to bring Tyler’s character back. “She just has this real humanity to her,” Onah explained on The Official Marvel Podcast. “The relationship she ends up having with Thaddeus Ross in this film is a real big part of his journey of trying to cement his legacy and redefine who he has been as a human being and as a leader.”
As for Nelson’s Samuel Sterns, the cellular biologist plays a minor, yet important role in The Incredible Hulk as he attempts to cure Banner’s Hulk problem. He appears off-screen for most of the film, exchanging discreet messages online with Banner under the moniker “Mr. Blue.” During the film’s chaotic climax, Blonsky forces Sterns to transform him into the Abomination, and an open wound in Sterns’s head is exposed to Banner’s gamma-irradiated blood. While we never see the final result, Sterns is last glimpsed at the onset of a monstrous, super-powered transformation of his own, his head rapidly enlarging as a devious smile forms across his face.
In Brave New World, Sterns will finally become the super-intelligent villain known as the Leader. "I had only one request, which was that we realize the character practically and they were willing to do that," Nelson told Entertainment Weekly last year. "Of course, if they'd said no, I still would have done it. But I wanted to really have the look and the weight of the character and look in the mirror and see the deformation of the character and have the other actors experience that."
While it’s a little ironic that this Incredible Hulk reunion in Brave New World will (probably) be missing the Strongest Avenger himself, the 2008 film is crucial to the new Captain America entry. This movie is really as much an Incredible Hulk sequel as it is anything else—which is hard to believe, given the passage of time and The Incredible Hulk’s status as one of the lowest-grossing and most forgettable films in the MCU.
Eternals
Well, I bet you didn’t think you’d ever hear about this movie again, either. While Eternals was a mess in terms of its story and overabundance of characters, it was still more interesting from a visual standpoint than the vast majority of Marvel’s movies. But all that really matters to Disney is the bottom line, and the 2021 film made $402 million at the global box office against a reported budget of $273 million, making it one of the least successful MCU projects. Marvel Studios has seemingly tried to forget that the events of Eternals ever happened—at least until now. We might not be seeing the return of Harry Styles in the new Captain America film, but the MCU is finally ready to address the elephant in the room. Or, rather, the Celestial in the ocean.
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Without getting too deep into the movie’s convoluted plot, its central conflict involves the titular team of ancient superheroes discovering that their true purpose on Earth is to prepare the planet for the so-called Emergence: the birth of a Celestial, a massive cosmic entity of vast power, from a seed planted deep inside the planet’s core. The Emergence would destroy Earth in the process, so the Eternals band together to prevent this Celestial—named Tiamut—from annihilating what has become their home over the past thousands of years. When they eventually succeed (notably without the help of any Avenger or other superhero), all that’s left of Tiamut is its hand, frozen in place as it rises above the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Tiamut—or Celestial Island, as the Eternal’s remains are now called—plays a surprisingly large role in the conflict that arises in Brave New World. As teasers for the film confirm, Tiamut’s corpse is being mined for a new natural resource that has world-altering implications for the MCU: adamantium.
Even casual Marvel fans who have seen an X-Men movie in the past 25 years would probably recognize the powerful metal alloy made famous by Wolverine, whose claws (and bones) are laced with it. As Ross says in the film, adamantium is “the discovery of the millennium,” one that will tip the scales of global power toward whichever nation lays claim to it. While this find spurs the race for the “world’s most versatile element” that takes place in Brave New World, it’s also a crucial development for the X-Men movie that Marvel Studios is setting up.
“Adamantium, as we know, will eventually be a part of Project X,” Onah said in an interview with ScreenRant. “It will eventually be a part of the story of Wolverine. So adamantium now becomes this resource that could change the world in a way that's very different, because vibranium is something that is really under the purview of the Wakandans. This is why it becomes an amazing geopolitical football in our film.”
The (re)introduction of adamantium in Brave New World is a big step toward the live-action MCU debuts of the X-Men and whoever will likely replace Hugh Jackman as the new Wolverine. But it’s also a clear signal of Marvel’s efforts to use this film as a cog in its greater storytelling machine. Although world-building efforts like these have helped the studio weave together interconnected stories with satisfying results in the past, we’ve also seen that same strategy backfire for far too many individual projects that sacrifice too much of themselves to serve the MCU’s future.
Looking back through this primer, it may be just a bit of a red flag that Brave New World is steeped in a history of mediocre MCU stories, while also bearing the burden of both tying up loose ends from previous films and setting up future projects. But with only two other MCU films remaining before Avengers: Doomsday arrives in May 2026, there isn’t much time for Marvel to plant narrative seeds that could grow in its next major crossover project. Thus, Brave New World has been positioned to bear much of that responsibility.
"Brave New World is a great title for this film," Mackie told Entertainment Weekly at Comic-Con in 2024. "It’s a new beginning, and it’s a foundation on which Marvel will build the universe [now]. Not only this character but all the characters that surround him are new building blocks for us to utilize to move on through the universe and into the future."
Brave New World has a challenging task ahead of it, and how this movie performs at the box office may be a strong indication of how the rest of the Multiverse Saga will unfold, financially and narratively.
