If you were going into next month’s Captain America: Brave New World hoping to see Anthony Mackie duke it out with Seth Rollins, the WWE wrestler said you should leave your expectations at the ticket buying app.
In a recent interview with Chris Van Vilet, Rollins said he wouldn’t appear in the film. Back in 2023, he was shown on set, leading fans to speculate he was playing a member of the Serpent Society. Marvel never formally confirmed his casting, and Rollins was vague about who he’d have been. Uncertain about his NDA, all he could say was Brave New World’s script “went through a lot of rewrites and reshoots. […] Essentially my role got either repurposed or completely erased.” He also auditioned to pop into another role, or a potential “repurposing” of his original part, but neither option panned out.
“I will unequivocally say I am not in the film,” he continued. Rollins was actually very insistent on letting his fans down, and told Van Vilet he didn’t want fansto think he’s pulling an Andrew Garfield. “I don’t want those people to waste their time, and I don’t want to misinform anybody. […] “They ended up going in a different direction with it. Marvel knows they’ve got a finished product that hopefully they’re happy with, and hopefully it’s successful. But [Brave New World] will be sans Seth Rollins. Marvel does a great job, it should be a good one.”
Outside of nixing Rollins’ part, Brave New World’s troubled production has been fairly well-known. Its release date has been shuffled around a few times, and its production was paused once the Hollywood strikes started. After those ended, the film underwent multiple reshoots and rewrites, allegedly due to negative test screenings. Initial reports claimed three “major sequences” were cut in the reshoots, but Anthony Mackie’s since described them as just “a few more scenes.”
This isn’t the first Marvel movie to have its reshoots known, but its misfortunes (and the cultural background around Sabra, one of its key supporting characters) have hovered around the movie longer than normal. We’ll see how Captain America: Brave New World ultimately fares when it hits theaters on Valentine’s Day.
[via IGN]
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