Anthony Mackie wants a trilogy of Captain America movies. Good for him. Somebody at Marvel should probably sit him down and tell him the bad news.
Mackie was on Josh Horowitz's "Happy Sad Confused" podcast and demanded that his unpopular character get two more solo movies.
"I think every character deserves a second film," Mackie said. "I think with Cap, it's been proven every character deserves three films, right? I mean, if you're Thor, you get four, apparently."
Then he took a swing at Sony and Marvel's favorite cash machine: "Seventeen Spider-Mans. All of them had three movies. That's about 51. It's a lot of fucking Spider-Man, right?"
His bottom line: "Every character deserves three movies. So, I would enjoy partaking in the idea of two more films just to see that character complete his arc."
Look, I like Mackie. He's been a team player in this franchise for over a decade, mostly standing next to bigger names. I get why he wants Sam to have a proper conclusion. That said, "deserves" is doing a lot of work there, and it's a word Mackie likes. This is the same actor who told Esquire last year that he'd "been overlooked so many times in [his] career" and that he'd given "at least four performances" that deserved a nomination. So I played the game. I scrolled through Mackie's filmography looking for these four diamond performances, but there weren't any.
Now he says his MCU character deserves two more solo movies, but the math doesn't compute there either. "Captain America: Brave New World" didn't make money, at least not by Marvel's standards. It grossed around $415 million worldwide in 2025. That's less than half of what "Civil War" made, which crossed a billion. And it wasn't cheap. The official production budget was about $180 million, but months of extensive reshoots reportedly pushed the real cost much higher. The reviews were mixed at best, and audiences didn't exactly take a liking to it.
For now, Mackie's future runs through "Avengers: Doomsday." If it's the hit Disney badly needs, and Sam somehow comes out of it as the face of the new Avengers (which I doubt), maybe the math changes. Stranger things have happened in the MCU.
"I think every character deserves a second film," Mackie said. "I think with Cap, it's been proven every character deserves three films, right? I mean, if you're Thor, you get four, apparently."