The third Captain American movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Civil War was a somewhat prelude for what was to come with Avengers: Endgame.
With nearly every superhero in the franchise present in the film at the time, Civil War also marked the debut of Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.
Nearly all the OG Avengers were featured in the film (Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner), plus a slew of then-new additions in Anthony Mackie, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Rudd, Sebastian Stan and Paul Bettany. And Marvel fans surely showed up in theaters when the film was released on May 6, 2016 to support the theatrical event.
Civil War became the 25th movie to ever cross the $1 billion mark in May, and is the highest-grossing worldwide film of 2016. (It’s third on the domestic list, falling only behind two other Disney flicks.)
THR’s film critic Sheri Linden forecasted Civil War’s profit in her 2016 review, writing, “As the third Captain America film jump-starts the summer movie season, and something called Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its box-office muscle is beyond question.”
“Like the previous Captain America feature, 2014’s The Winter Soldier, the film was scripted by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, with Anthony and Joe Russo at the helm. Within genre requirements, they achieve an overall balance between super-kinetic — or numbing, depending on your point of view — action sequences and character detail, although more of the latter would have been welcome,” continued the review.
“And while the chance to see old-school Steve Rogers and modern guy Tony Stark, aka Captain America and Iron Man, go mano a mano is inherently thrilling only to diehard fans, even nonbelievers who make it to that climactic moment will feel that something is at stake when the two face off.”