Captain America: Civil War was nearly a very different movie…

Ahead of the release of Captain America: Civil War Marvel’s head honcho Kevin Feige has spoken out about the film’s origins, saying that it was originally planned as a very different movie.

In an interview with io9, Feige discusses the original plan to follow directly on from Winter Soldier, focusing heavily on Bucky.

“We developed Captain America 3 knowing we wanted to continue the Bucky story,” says Feige.

“Is Bucky going to get his mind back? What is Bucky struggling with, after the tag scene onWinter Soldier, and how does Steve’s desire to save Bucky bring him into conflict with something else, thinking about how do the sins of his past sort of affect him? And [writers] Chris [Markus] and Steve [McFeely] came up with a number of cool plots that could’ve worked, but none of them were feeling worthy of a follow up to Winter Soldier.”

Feige says he has always been a fan of Mark Miller’s Civil War run in the comics, saying he is proud to see it come to the big screen, “I thought, if we’re going to do Civil War, which I always wanted to do, this is the time to do it. All we have to get is this, this, this and this. ‘Okay, well the odds of that are very slim.’ ‘Okay, but if we could, what would it be?’ Chris and Steve started to chart out various versions of the movie. [Versions] without Iron Man, [versions] without Spider-Man—but we’re very lucky we got to make the whole one. The one we really wanted do.”

Co-writers McFeely and Marcus also weighed in on the questions they had about Bucky’s story, with Marcus saying “Do you put [Bucky] away for a while? Do you bring him back? And how do you not tread the same ground? It would be very easy to bring Winter Soldier back and fight him again. We plotted out a movie that wasn’t Civil War, but that had sort of the central spine that you still see, with Zemo and Bucky and a couple of the set pieces. And the further you probe into the effects of the Winter Soldier on the [Marvel Cinematic Universe], by not bringing in other people, we’re actually ignoring content.”

When asked in a recent interview with Screen Rant (via Squareeyed), the directing duo of the Russos have a lot to say about the importance of getting Robert Downey Jr in to play Iron Man again. Talking about the original concept, Joe says “It wasn’t Civil War from the start. It was something that we were discussing and we had in the back of our minds, and we knew that if we were going to come back and do another Cap film, we wanted to do something radical and make another strong choice for the character. We were looking for storylines that would allow us to do that, and we just kept coming back to Civil War as the storyline that would give us the most juice – storytelling juice – and challenge Cap as a character more extremely than any other plot that we came up with in the exploratory phase.”

“We did put ourselves in the position, both with Robert and with Spider-Man, where we were hanging out there quite a bit. We committed on a storytelling level to both characters and we just, you know, willed those into existence.”

Good thing RDJ said yes then.

Captain America: Civil War hits cinemas on the 29th April.