Action Figures Were More Important To Captain America: Civil War Than We Ever Would Have Guessed
Pitting one superhero against another is something that comic book writers have been doing for decades, and the question of "If Superhero X fought Superhero Y, who would come out on top?" seems to be just as compelling today as it was during the golden age of comics. Take the recently released "Spider-Man: Far From Home," which pits Spider-Man (Tom Holland) against Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), or Marvel's "What If?" series, which saw Captain Marvel (voiced by Alexandra Daniels) go head-to-head with Thor (voiced by Chris Hemsworth).
Undoubtedly, the best example of this comic book trope comes in "Captain America: Civil War," which saw Earth's mightiest heroes split into two distinct teams and battle each other for an entire movie. This showdown between the two teams comes to a head in the iconic airport fight scene, wherein the forces led by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans) duke it out in a massive, climactic battle featuring a dozen different superheroes. Hilariously, this epic confrontation between the two warring sides was actually planned using action figures, which apparently took an incredible amount of time.
The filmmakers used action figures to plan out the film's airport fight sequence
During his appearance on the "Stuntmen React" series by Corridor Crew, stunt coordinator James Young explained how the team used action figures to painstakingly plan out every little detail of this fight sequence. Young said that the first week of development was spent sitting down with the Russo brothers, Kevin Feige, and Dan DeLeeuw (the head of VFX for the movie) and using action figures to work on the team makeups, the story, and the battle itself.
Young explained that the designing principle behind the entire fight was that every single superhero had to have a "moment" during the fight: a small victory that was not upstaged or diminished by the actions of the other heroes. As such, it took the team an extremely long time to balance these little wins and make sure that the tide of battle never went fully to one side or the other – keeping it fresh and exciting the entire way through. The result is an action-packed, iconic fight sequence that stands among some of the best that the MCU has ever produced — though it's still hilarious to consider that the sequence was essentially constructed by a bunch of men playing with action figures.