- Anthony Mackie (Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) says that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series for Disney+ is like “a six or eight-hour movie.”
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was set to debut on Disney+ this August, but the novel coronavirus pandemic will likely force Marvel to delay the release.
2020 was meant to be a fresh start for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Following the events of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, Black Widow was going to serve as a bridge into the second MCU saga, with new heroes and villains to meet and new stories to tell. But then the viral pandemic stopped production on virtually every movie and TV show on the planet, theaters closed, and Marvel’s entire 2020 slate was pushed back.
2020 was also going to be the year that Marvel Studios took over for the TV unit that produced Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and all of the other Marvel content on Netflix. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was supposed to be the first show set in the MCU to debut on Disney+, but, along with everything else, was shut down back in March. We haven’t heard much about the show since, but Anthony Mackie (aka Falcon) participated in Variety’s Actors on Actors series this week with Daveed Diggs and provided some tantalizing teasers about the show.
“We’re shooting [The Falcon and the Winter Soldier] exactly like a movie,” Mackie told Diggs when pressed for details during their discussion. “Everybody who had worked on TV before was like, ‘I’ve never worked on a TV show like this.’ The way in which we were shooting, it feels exactly like we were shooting the movie cut up into the show. So instead of a two-hour movie, a six or eight-hour movie.”
As Variety points out, the reported $150 million budget of Falcon is relatively enormous, but not compared to the $350 million budget of Avengers: Endgame, which clocked in at 181 minutes. Meanwhile, the Falcon series will be at least twice as long, and it’s hard to imagine Marvel skimping on production value.
Mackie also talked about what it was like to go through the coronavirus shutdown in Europe:
We were in Europe, and everything got crazy in Europe first. So they shut us down two weeks before the U.S. shutdown. It was really amazing just because I feel like we’re the first Marvel show or movie that had budget constraints. And that was always my [experience], ‘It’s Marvel, we could shoot forever.’ And they’re like, ‘Nah.’ So it was a very different experience from the rest of the movies. But at the same time, it was a lot of fun. Those movies are like summer camp. And this show, it was no different. It was the same group of people, coming together to make it work. And so the stunt stuff — everything is just on another level. Every show, every movie, they just push it — they push the envelope so much. So hopefully, knock on wood, we’ll be going back soon.
You can watch the entire conversation between Anthony Mackie and Daveed Diggs below:
