He might not have any superpowers, but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if John Wick turned up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’d comfortably be able to hand the majority of the Avengers their asses on a platter, and Thanos should count himself lucky that the sharp-suited assassin’s new canine companion wasn’t dusted as part of the Snap.
Having captivated viewers with nine episodes of the reality-bending WandaVision, it’s time for the MCU to go back to basics with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It’s a good old fashioned buddy adventure, albeit one with superheroes, and all of the trailers have promised the sort of wham-bang action and snappy banter that’s characterized the majority of the franchise’s output over the last thirteen years.
Many of the early reactions were somewhat surprised at just how hard-hitting the action is, but that’s exactly the reason why John Wick scribe Derek Kolstad was recruited for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s writing staff in the first place. In a new interview, Kolstad revealed that Marvel were pushing him to make the action even bigger than he thought he’d be able to get away with in the family-friendly Disney arena, and he admitted that he looked to inject Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes’ spinoff with some of that John Wick flavor.
“Oh, dude for me, yeah, because they uncap in regards to the action. They would encourage us to go big. And then, we would go big and they’d come back with, ‘That’s awesome, you can go a little bit bigger?’. And yet, it was still rather grounded. The action, I can’t even say what they allowed us to do, but what they encouraged us to do was as John Wick as anything I’d ever done before, man. And when you get to play in that IP, in that universe, the eleven -year-old me is just giggling all day long. You know?”
We’re less than 48 hours away from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiering on Disney Plus, and looking at how the last few episodes of WandaVision fared from the second they were added to the library, the app is probably going to crash right around midnight as everyone logs on at exactly the same time with the exact same thought on their minds.