How ‘Falcon And The Winter Soldier’ Could Further Expand Marvel’s Hollywood Monopoly

Marvel’s globe-trotting action comedy Disney+ show may well fill the void of most of this year’s biggest potentially-delayed blockbuster movies.

It’s no secret that Marvel and Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is attempting to apply the real-world globetrotting spy adventures of the Russos’ Captain America sequels to the Disney+ Marvel television branch of the universe. This six-episode action series, allegedly costing around $150 million and set after the events of Avengers: Endgame, acts as a loose sequel to The Winter Soldier and Civil War, with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes reluctantly teaming up to stop a new plot allegedly spearheaded by Zemo and possibly involving the Atom Smashers and John Walker, a militaristic government-backed successor to Captain America.  As the two-minute preview released last night during the Super Bowl indicates, the tone is apparently more Hobbs & Shaw than Mission: Impossible.

The trailer seems very much cut from the same cloth as David Leitch’s Fast & Furious spin-off. You’ve got a true-blue hero (Dwayne Johnson/Anthony Mackie) who is reluctantly partnered with a reformed bad guy with red on his ledger (Jason Statham/Sebastian Stan) to save the proverbial day, in a spy game actioner with the two colorful heroes spending as much time ripping on each other as taking out the bad guys. All that’s missing is a second-act montage set to “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” Partially due to the trailer’s length and partially due to a guaranteed March 19 release date, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier trailer made more of an impact last night than the actual teaser for the actual Fast and Furious movie.

That F9 commercial merely offered that the film was “coming soon to theaters,” as opposed to the previously announced May 28 release date. The theatrical fates of the big May flicks are still up in the air, and it’s possible that (save for the Warner Bros. movies which will drop in theaters and on HBO Max) this year’s summer movie season will be as non-existent as last year’s. If that happens, then not only will The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will potentially make up for many/most of the big delayed blockbuster movies. It’ll be a substitute for No Time to Die, Black Widow, F9, Top Gun: Maverick and direct competition to both Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Amazon’s Without Remorse.

The day after last year’s Super Bowl, I noted that many/most of this year’s biggest would-be blockbusters were comparatively old-school action-adventure movies. Think Bad Boys for Life, Birds of Prey, Tenet, Black Widow, No Time to Die, F9, Top Gun: Maverick and Mulan. Yes, some of these films had an element of fantasy. Chris Nolan’s Tenet dabbles in time inversion while Black Canary barely uses her vocal superpowers in Cathy Yan’s otherwise non-fantastical gangster action comedy. However, the core appeal was/is seeing big stars and/or marquee characters engaging in real-world action in comparatively grounded and Earthbound adventures. Since so many big 2020 releases got pushed to 2021, the story is the same, at least until Dune, Eternals and Spider-Man 3 close out 2021.

However, the presumed 2021 biggies, including some (like Mission: Impossible 7) which were always destined for 2021, now have competition in the form of at-home biggies. Not only is Without Remorse (starring Michael B. Jordan as Tom Clancy hero/anti-hero John Clark) debuting on Amazon on April 30, but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is following the Captain America sequel playbook of offering a big-budget Tom Clancy-meets-Sydney Pollack action spectacular featuring popular marquee superheroes. Pardon the digression, but Zack Snyder’s four-hour Justice League (which will likely run almost as long as the six 40-50 minute episodes of Marvel’s spy show) may provide a bigger action fantasy experience, in terms of scope, size and scale, than anything arriving in theaters this summer.

If the big movies from this summer get delayed, then The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will be essentially the only game in town. It very specifically and intentionally approximates the tropes, pleasures and formulas of quite a few of this year’s biggest theatrical movies. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has the gadget-friendly spy tech of Mission: Impossible 7 and No Time to Die, the character-specific (and surrogate family-related) conflict of F9, the mid-air action of Top Gun: Maverick and a “real world action adventure” aesthetic presumably not unlike Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. It’ll be your “one-stop shopping” for almost every big action movie you really wanted to see this year. It’ll be an ironic place to find this “sequel to Civil War.”

Marvel became a dominant force by approximating popular cinematic genres to an extent that folks lost interest in the genuine article. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the success of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which pancaked the mediocre Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Captain America: Civil War (which swallowed up the audience for blockbuster-y movies and would-be adult-skewing flicks like Money Monster, Triple-9 and The Nice Guys in one action-driven, character-comedy, politically-minded swoop). It’s one thing for Marvel content to supplant the demand for non-IP genre fare and star-driven studio programmers, so that the actual Tom Clancy movie goes to streaming. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, with its MCU-meets-Hobbs & Shaw marketing, threatens to supplant its (potentially delayed) blockbuster competition.