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Captain America Screenwriters Talk About the Past and Present Settings of the Sequel

Despite Captain America: The First Avenger not opening until this Friday, Marvel Studios hired the movie's screenwriters — Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus — in February to write a sequel. While box office receipts will be the ultimate determining factor for a sequel, McFeely and Markus revealed in June that the potential Captain America 2 will have "room to go back to World War II" and won't entirely be set in the present day, though the sequel would take place after Captain America's first adventure in the modern era in 2012's The Avengers.

In an interview with The Playlist, McFeely said, while a Captain America sequel is still in the "'What if?' stages", going back to WWII is still a part of the conversation.

When we sit down with Marvel every couple weeks, that’s what we talk about. Is it all present day? Is there a flashback structure? Is that what people want to see? I think there’s a great way to do both and to make sure that you’re not taking away from the story itself. But I think there’s value to it. I mean, that’s what separated Cap from all the other comic book heroes. The things that have affected him in the past sometimes crop up in the present, whether that’s emotionally, whether that’s an actual villain or a MacGuffin [plot device that moves the story forward] or whatever.

Markus said that the writers are looking forward to writing Cap in the modern day as well.

Now that he’s well established, I’m actually looking forward to taking him into the modern world because we don’t have to sort of give short shrift to WWII and, you know, back-explain it. I don’t think it will be like Encino Man where Cap’s holding a cell phone and going, "What the hell is this?" But that’s the Cap people know. By and large, people know Cap from ’63 on. He’s the man out of time, so we are looking forward to giving people the Cap that more or less dominated the comics for the last 50 years. We liked the fact that Marvel was willing to do both.

So how much of the sequel will be in the present and how much will be in the present day? In an interview with Collider, McFeely said that switching eras has "worked well in the comic books forever" with Markus admitting that the percentage of past and present has yet to be worked out.

Yeah I mean [Captain America comic book writer Ed] Brubaker does great stuff with, you know he goes to Paris now and he’ll flash back to the liberation of Paris and it’s like: one, it’s really cool but it’s really informative as to who this guy is that’s standing there. So we haven’t settled on a percentage you know — 80/20, 50/50 — of what it would be but I think we definitely would like to season it.

Whatever the story for Captain America 2 turns out to be, McFeely says the movie will focus solely on Cap and not his Avengers teammates.

You're unlikely to see a lot of crossover, except in The Avengers. When you're an Iron Man movie, you should be an Iron Man movie and Thor shouldn't come by and say, "Hey, what're you doing tonight?" If there's a sequel, it's Captain America 2, it shouldn't be "Cap and Friends". So, the crossovers are reserved for The Avengers [movies].

Captain America: The First Avenger was directed by Joe Johnston and stars Chris Evans as a young and skinny Steve Rogers, who joins the Super Soldier program in order to get a chance to fight in World War II. The movie co-stars Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Sebastian Stan as James "Bucky" Barnes, Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan, Toby Jones as Arnim Zola, Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, and Hugo Weaving as the diabolical Red Skull.