Meet the new “Captain America” in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is the first of Disney’s upcoming original Marvel series, shows starring the actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This one, obviously, will be about the Falcon, aka Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and the Winter Soldier, aka Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), last seen fighting Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. The both of them were out of commission for a while after Thanos snapped them out of existence, but they came back raring to go.

Also, at the very end of the movie, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) passed the title of Captain America onto Sam. So things are looking up for this pair, right?

That’s gonna be a hard no. Although Sam and Bucky helped defeat Thanos, they’re still fugitives from the law thanks to their activities in Captain America: Civil War. The more looks we get behind the scenes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the more it looks like the government is going to make trouble for the pair of them. To get specifics, the show seems to be adapting a story from the comics where the government creates and supports its own version of Captain America, a hero named U.S. Agent, real name John Walker.

We’ve known for a while that actor Wyatt Russell would play U.S. Agent on TV. And now, we have our first shots of him in uniform…two kinds of uniforms, actually:

Yup, that is definitely a Captain America copy, shield and all.

I think this is an intriguing direction for the show to take. Who are the real heroes here: Sam and Bucky, who are technically fugitives but trying (we assume) to do the right thing; or U.S. Agent, who’s officially sanctioned by the government but who’s something of an unknown quantity at this point? It sounds like fertile ground for storytelling.

Due to circumstances beyond its control, production on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier suffered a setback recently, but we still expect it to be the first Marvel series to debut on Disney+ later this year. After that, we’ve got WandaVision, which is also scheduled to come out this year, and then later, Loki and Hawkeye.

MCU, meet TV.

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