When it was announced in February of 2015 that Spider-Man would be joining the ensemble of characters in Captain America: Civil War, fans rejoiced at the prospect of finally seeing Peter Parker swing into action alongside his fellow Avengers. Details surrounding Spider-Man's inclusion were rather scarce at first, but it now turns out that slinging Spidey into Civil War's conflict was always on the minds of directors Joe and Anthony Russo.
In a new interview, the Russos have admitted that they placed Spider-Man into their story long before the famous deal with Sony was made, even though they weren't 100% sure if they could use him at the time. "That was part of the tricky thing. We had to make a commitment to the character of Spider-Man long before the deal was in place to let us use him. When you’re telling a story you have to fully commit. We had to be fully committed that that character needed to be in the story, and the story couldn’t happen without him. So we were there psychologically, and you couldn’t do it any other way. But you are sort of exposed because, yeah, you could get the bad news that the deal doesn’t work out. So we’re eternally grateful to Kevin Feige and all the good folks at Sony, that they were able to work out a deal, because we would have been really left hanging without him."
Of course, deals don't always work out. According to Civil War writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, there were a few instances where it looked like the deal might fall through, and they left a particular section of the script open to change, just in case. "You can see on a structure level, we left a little recruitment section, so that, you know, worst case scenario, somebody didn’t get along at corporate, that could be somebody else if we had to. But we definitely wanted to go in that direction and then we were going to have Ant-Man in the other direction, and that’s about everybody getting an arc appropriate to their role in the movie."
Captain America: Civil War releases May 6, 2016.
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