It has to go down as a missed opportunity for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it had a bad guy with an awesome costume, an in-canon arc that tied him directly to almost all of the key Avengers, who also happened to be played by a proven action star with a lifelong affinity for training in martial arts and general ass-kicking. Then again, nobody’s more upset about what happened to Crossbones than Frank Grillo himself.
The actor signed a five-picture contract with Marvel Studios that he didn’t even come close to maximizing, after being killed off in the prologue of Captain America: Civil War. He did briefly return during Avengers: Endgame‘s time heist, and then again in an episode of Disney Plus animated series What If…?, but Grillo hasn’t been shy in voicing his disappointment at his tenure being cut short.
Plenty of fans are in agreement that Brock Rumlow could have had a much bigger part to play in the MCU, with Reddit pouring one out in solidarity with a sweet-ass villain that had all the potential to become a recurring B-level threat to many of the saga’s best and brightest superheroes.
We’ve seen several villains live to fight another day and return further down the line, with Loki and Baron Zemo even becoming fan favorites in the process, but the ship appears to have sailed on Crossbones. Given that he signs onto a new movie on what feels like a weekly basis, Grillo is hardly going to be short of work, but it would have been exciting to see what his antagonistic mercenary could have accomplished in the MCU were he given more time.