The Falcon and the Winter Soldier only wrapped up a few weeks ago, with the announcement of Captain America 4 following shortly afterwards, but there’s already been plenty of chatter about where the story could potentially be headed. Naturally, though, with the project in the very earliest days of development, it’ll be a long time before we hear any specifics, especially when star Anthony Mackie appears to know less about it than anyone else after finding out the movie was in the works from a guy at his local grocery store.
Looking at how the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s second Disney Plus series concluded, several potential storyline seeds have been sown, but there’s an awful lot of feature film and episodic content to arrive between now and whenever Captain America 4 hits the big screen, so the complexion of the mythology could be completely different by then.
However, the show’s executive producer and lead writer Malcolm Spellman, who’s overseeing development of the MCU’s fourth star-spangled blockbuster alongside Dalan Musson, recently teased that Sam Wilson’s lack of superpowers will greatly inform the direction of his journey.
“I believe that’s going to be his conflict moving forward. It’s appropriate. In the action genre, what made Die Hard a classic wasn’t who Bruce Willis beat, it was what he went through to beat them. He’s walking through glass with no shoes on, you know what I’m saying? That’s what people can identify with; ‘This motherf*cker is just like me and taking on the bad guys’. What better hero than that to root for?”
It makes sense when Sam’s spent the majority of his time in the MCU so far surrounded by super soldiers like Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, John Walker and even Karli Morgenthau, and at the end of the day he’s just a dude with a nifty set of vibranium wings and a shield. In the comic books, the former Falcon never took the serum, and while it remains to be seen if Captain America 4 will follow suit, it would definitely benefit his general arc if he was to continue wrestling with what it means to be a regular guy with a very important job.