Civil War directors on how their take on Spider-Man will be different

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

The upcoming CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR will be jam-packed with just about every Marvel Cinematic Universe character we've met so far, as well as introducing us to a few new ones, including everybody's favourite web-slinger, Spider-Man. We still don't know exactly how much screen-time our brand-new Spider-Man will have in the film, but CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR directors Joe and Anthony Russo have obviously put a lot of thought into Spider-Man's introduction to the MCU. The director's recently spoke with ComicBook.com and Joe Russo discussed how the new Spider-Man (played by Tom Holland) will differ from the previous incarnations as well as other Marvel heroes..

We took a very personal approach to the character, he was my favorite character growing up, so the opportunity to bring Spider-Man to the screen is a dream come true. It's something that I spent a lot of time thinking about as a kid. We had thought back to the things that excited us about him as a character when we were younger, and one of the most important components of that was that he's a high schooler burdened with incredible powers and responsibility. That really differentiates him from every other character in the Marvel universe as opposed to other superheroes. For us, it was extremely important that we cast somebody very close to the age of a high school student. The previous films had adults playing a high schooler. We wanted more of an authenticity to the casting. We were very specific about that. We wanted an energy and charisma from the character, an energy, but also an insecurity that would make him fun to watch in contrast to the confident superheroes.

Anthony Russo added:

I would also add, again, we're introducing this character in a Captain America movie, if you look at what we did with Winter Soldier with the Cap character in terms of bringing him into the modern world, trying to ground the movie tonally into something that was a step toward real-world, at least to the degree you can do that in a superhero movie, that's still the tonal universe that we're playing in in Civil War. We're bringing a character…we're bringing Spider-Man into the movie in that universe, now, in that specific tonal stylistic world. I think underscoring everything Joe was saying about your question in terms of how were we thinking about the character in relation to past interpretations of the character, part of our choices were all so colored by the specifics of the world what we were playing in with these two Captain America movies, meaning Winter Soldier and Civil War. It's a very specific tonal world. It's a little more grounded and a little more hard-core contemporary. That was also coloring our choices a lot about the character on Spider-Man.

The Russo brothers aren't entirely dismissing the previous cinematic interpretations of Spider-Man, in fact, they consider SPIDER-MAN 2 to be one of their favourite comic book movies of all time, but they feel like Sam Raimi "made a very strong choice with those movies from a color palate standpoint to a costume standpoint, execution standpoint, camerawork standpoint to honor the feeling of the comic book." When Spider-Man makes his appearance in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, the directors will be dialing back that comic book feeling as they hope to "honor the feeling of naturalism and to honor the feeling of reality." It's also very important for them to make the audience feel "that these characters live in the world that we live in because it makes them more real and it makes our experience of watching them more passionate and more well-rounded.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR will hit theaters on May 6, 2016.