In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, "Captain America: Civil War" director Joe Russo explained how he and his brother, co-director Anthony Russo, tried to distinguish the "Captain America" franchise from other hero movies and take it in a new direction.
"For our part, when we finished 'Winter Soldier' two years ago and we were thinking about doing the next one the only thing that seemed interesting to us was to deconstruct the Marvel Universe — because where else can we go at this point? There have been 11 or 12 movies so far, all with a fairly traditional structure," Russo said.
Although the "Captain America" franchise had been very successful, Joe and Anthony anticipated that at some point audiences would tire of the Marvel formula:
"Our pitch to [Marvel] was: 'People will tell you they love chocolate ice cream — until you give it to them five days a week. It's time to give them some rainbow sherbet,'" he explained. "[Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige] is a maverick and he's very sensitive to how people are responding to his content. He said he thought we might be right."
After the announcement of "Batman v Superman," which began as a straight-forward "Man of Steel" sequel and later became a crossover tentpole with multiple heroes, Feige agreed to a new direction for "Captain America" that would break from tradition.
" ... After they [Warner Bros.] announced 'Batman v Superman,' [Kevin Feige] said, 'you guys are absolutely right.' We needed to do something challenging with the material or we were going to start to lose the audience," Russo said.
