Anthony Mackie Nearly Made His Captain America Debut in ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’
• With Spider-Man: Far From Home about to debut, Marvel executives revealed a cameo that almost happened.
• Far From Home nearly saw Anthony Mackie make his Captain America debut, but it wasn't in the cards.
• The movie, which stars Tom Holland as Spidey, comes out on July 2.
As the July/August cover of Men's Health reveals, there's a new Captain America in town, and it's Anthony Mackie. We know that he'll make his debut (of sorts) in the Disney+ series Falcon & Winter Soldier, which enters production this fall and will debut in 2020.
But it looks like there was a chance Mackie could've donned the shield even sooner than anyone could've expected.
As it turns out, according to an interview that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and creative executive Eric Carroll did with ComicBook.com, there was an idea to have Sam Wilson show up toward the end of Far From Home, which would've been Mackie's debut as Captain America.
"We briefly talked about bringing in Falcon as Captain America at the end, like maybe once Peter's arced, and he's sort of like leading the team, like maybe he calls in a favor," Carroll explained. "But we also thought it was really important to the arc of this movie that there not be other Avengers available to Nick Fury or Peter, so he'd have to step up and do it himself."
Feige was eager to make sure that Far From Home established Spider-Man as his own hero. In his appearances so far-Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Captain America: Civil War, and his first solo outing, Spider-Man: Homecoming-he's been established as the kid who needs guidance. Now, he needs to blaze his own path.
"Ultimately, Spider-Man: Far From Home is Spider-Man's journey, whether any other heroes appear in it or not. "It's all about Peter stepping up," Feige said.
Mackie himself got word of this little crossover that wasn't, and had some fun with Holland through a tweet responding to ComicBook.com's story.
"Shit. REALLY?! Way to go @TomHolland1996 to mess that one up!" he wrote.
Shit. REALLY?! Way to go @TomHolland1996 to mess that one up! 🙄
- Anthony Mackie (@AnthonyMackie) June 27, 2019
The idea didn't get very far in the process, though, as the movie's director, Jon Watts, doesn't even recall the conversation-though he does remember what would have been a different fun easter egg.
"You go through so many iterations of this story and like so many brainstorm sessions that I don't even remember that conversation," Watts said, before throwing out a separate cut idea that he did recall. "I remember one point we were talking about if one of the stops along the way through Europe was going to be New Asgard."
New Asgard, of course, was the Earth-grounded city where Chris Hemsworth's Thor (now looking Lebowski-esque) and Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie had begun to rebuild their society after the destruction at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. Spidey's surely got his hands full, but a quick detour to say hi to some old friends would've been nice, right?
What Carroll suggested sounds remarkably similar to the ending of another 2019 superhero movie, albeit one in a different universe. In Shazam! [spoiler if you haven't seen it yet!], once the film's main plot wraps up, the movie ends with the hero-of-many-names calling in a favor to Superman, who surprises students at a school.
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