On April 26 of this year, two days after the season finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuted on Disney+, actor Anthony Mackie was buying groceries. One presumes it was a normal day... until something shocking happened. His grocery informed him of a new development in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that he’d been part of for seven years, five movies, and one TV series: Marvel was going to make a fourth Captain America movie and he was set to star. Though it was news to him at the time, it’s now become “official.”
You might think the grocery store was a weird—perhaps even unlikely—way for Mackie to discover a new Cap movie was in the works, given that the actor has been an integral part of the MCU in general and the Captain America movies in particular ever since he debuted in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You might even think that Mackie and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige had discussed the possibility of the actor starring in a new Cap movie prior to April, given that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series was already planning to end with Mackie’s Sam Wilson taking the costume, name, and role of Captain America after an elderly Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) bequeathed him the shield in Avengers: Endgame.
But apparently, two days after TFatWS ended and god knows how many months of filming, no one had brought up the possibility to Mackie, according to none other than Mackie himself! As he told Entertainment Weekly on April 27, just one day after a grocery store employee broke the news to him: “I literally found out yesterday in a grocery store. The checkout guy named Dwayne, a cool cat, he’s like, ‘Yo, man. Is this real?!’ [holds up a cellphone] I’m like, ‘I haven’t heard anything.’ That’s what I love about working for Marvel. They call you, they’re like, ‘Come to L.A. We wanna tell you what’s going on.’ So, I’m excited to see what happens, but I haven’t heard anything.”
And why on Earth would Mackie lie? I mean, it’s such a ludicrous idea that no one would have brought up the possibility of a fourth Cap movie to the man now playing Captain America by that point—there’s no possible reason that Mackie would have said such a thing unless it was God’s honest truth. Most likely Disney had had the conversation but no contract was finalized at the time the news broke.
Thankfully today, Deadline has confirmed that Mackie has finally closed a deal to star in Captain America 4. We assume (but one never knows!) that the ink has finally dried on that contract—one he’s been made aware of considering he’ll be headlining his own MCU movie. If not, one can only pray that he’s heading to the grocery store later today so he can hear the news. Again.
There’s no word on the director for this film yet, or if Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier will be in it, but we do know it’s being written by TFatWS’s creator Malcolm Spellman and series writer Dalan Musson, which might not be great news, considering. Hopefully, Mackie ordered pizza for dinner that night.
Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.