Marvel Studios’ first limited series exclusive to Disney Plus still hasn’t been given the all-clear to resume shooting after being halted in March as the Coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier still hasn’t been officially delayed yet, either, meaning that the show is, for now, scheduled to arrive in August.
While there’ve been recent reports that the first run of episodes could be released in two parts to compensate for the lengthy delay in getting all of the required footage in the can, Marvel could really do with a win right now after being forced to drastically alter their plans for Phase Four, with fans currently facing the longest gap between MCU projects in almost a decade.
We still don’t have any concrete plot details available, and even by their usual standards the studio are playing things very close to their chest when it comes to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but in a recent interview, Anthony Mackie offered some new details on the nature of the production, and how it will continue to blur the lines in terms of the differences between filming movies and TV shows.
“We’re shooting it exactly like a movie. Everybody who had worked on TV before was like, ‘I’ve never worked on a TV show like this’. The way in which we were shooting, it feels exactly like we were shooting a movie, cut up into the show. So instead of a two-hour movie, a six or eight-hour movie.”
That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given that the MCU shows are said to have budgets pretty similar to their big screen counterparts, and from the sounds of things, Mackie seems to have relished the opportunity to have his biggest role yet playing in the franchise’s sandbox, even if switching to TV has presented a different experience from the one he’s used to.
“Those movies are like summer camp. And this show, it was no different. It was the same group of people, coming together to make it work. And so the stunt stuff, everything is just on another level. Every show, every movie, they just push it, they push the envelope so much. So hopefully, knock on wood, we’ll be going back soon… It was really amazing just because I feel like we’re the first Marvel show or movie that had budget constraints. And that was always my experience, ‘It’s Marvel, we could shoot forever’. And they’re like, ‘Nah’. So it was a very different experience from the rest of the movies. But at the same time, it was a lot of fun.”
Whether or not The Falcon and the Winter Soldier manages to make that August release date or not, expectations are already high for the world’s most popular franchise expanding onto the small screen, with plenty more shows set to follow over the next several years.