Where to watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Trivia & production notes

• The Russo brothers were considered for the directorial job partly because they created a Community episode that spoofed Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige's love for Star Wars.
• The Russos weren't permitted to read the screenplay until their first meeting with Marvel, and they spent two months on storyboards, rewrites, and an animatic before being hired.
• Anthony Russo told his wife he would reconsider his career if he didn't get selected to direct the film.
• Marvel Studios pitched the film to its directors as a 1970s political thriller disguised as a superhero movie, mirroring how they pitched the first Captain America as a 1940s World War II film in disguise.
• Screenwriters Markus and McFeely spent six months convincing themselves they could adapt Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier storyline from the comics before proceeding.
• Three Days of the Condor was used as the main structural template for the script, particularly its approach of having the protagonist chased by a mysterious threat that's only revealed halfway through.
• Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye was written out of the script because his character didn't have enough to do, with Black Widow absorbing his intended scenes and Renner's schedule unable to accommodate filming.
• The reveal of Arnim Zola as a computer consciousness required extensive rewrites to balance the grounded espionage thriller tone with the science fiction elements the character introduced.
• Chris McKenna, who worked with the Russo brothers on Community, contributed to the script by writing jokes for the film.
• Nick Fury's tombstone features the passage Ezekiel 25:17, a reference to Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Captain America: The Winter Soldier, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.