Amidst Marvel’s recent upheaval, life goes on. Filming for Captain America: New World Order is underway in Atlanta. Here are Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, and Shira Haas on set yesterday.
This is Mackie’s first feature film as Captain America, after picking up the mantle in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Danny Ramirez plays Joaquin Torres, the guy Sam Wilson tapped to take over his “Falcon” moniker, and Shira Haas plays Israeli superhero, Sabra. The film will be Sabra’s introduction, but NWO will have to reframe Sam’s new job, and who Joaquin is, because Marvel never assumes people actually watch everything, so there will be some kind of info dump to cover the developments of FATWS.
Speaking of the Winter Soldier, where is Bucky? Probably not in this movie! Or, if he does show up, it will be in a limited capacity. Sebastian Stan is set to appear in Thunderbolts along with Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and Wyatt Russell, which films this summer. Danny Ramirez is playing Cap’s sidekick in NWO, Joaquin is the new Bucky. We didn’t get to see much of Mackie and Ramirez’s rapport in FATWS, but I really liked Ramirez in Top Gun: Maverick. He made a small character pop, and really, that’s what Stan did with Bucky ten years ago. I also got to meet Ramirez last year, and WHEW, that SMILE is a LOT. He has a lot of spark and is just the right combination of sharp and charming to pop with the public. But will being Cap’s sidekick pay off for Danny Ramirez the same way it did Sebastian Stan?
I can’t shake the feeling that signing onto multi-part franchises now won’t work out as well as it did in the 2010s. Last decade, Stan used Marvel as a trampoline, he now has an Emmy nomination under his belt and consistently works with top-tier filmmakers and actors. But for Ramirez, it feels like less of a trampoline, more of a trap. I don’t think superhero movies survive the decade, at least as the driving force in pop culture. Marvel is best positioned to survive a genre collapse, but it feels like audiences are interested in other things now. We haven’t identified what the next big thing will be yet—fun little murder mysteries?—but I hope the class of interesting up-and-comers, like Danny Ramirez, aren’t locked into interminable franchise contracts when whatever it is hits big.
