Sam's Captain America Struggles Don't End With Falcon And The Winter Soldier

When The Falcon and the Winter Soldier ended with Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) donning a new suit and taking on the mantle of Captain America, fans weren't sure how the story would continue. Now, though, it's been reported that Falcon and Winter Soldier head writer Malcolm Spellman will be tackling the next Captain America movie. And as far as he's concerned, the story of Sam's struggle as a Black man carrying the shield can't be over yet.

"I think these are the conversations that are inherently embodied in these characters," he said to GameSpot. "All of them embody deeper conversations that are happening in our living rooms and I think we would have been sugarcoating s*** if we had just said, 'Hey man, I did it, you know? I beat racism because I'm Captain America.' There's no point in telling stories if you're not going to use them to tell bigger stories."

An important piece of that was the introduction of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a retired Black soldier who was part of the supersoldier program and ultimately imprisoned and experimented on by HYDRA. He rejected the idea of a Black man carrying the shield, let alone wanting to.

"Isaiah was crucial because he's the living embodiment of Sam's doubt," Spellman explained. "And I don't know that Sam disagrees with anything Isaiah said. It's no fluke that the book that gave us Isaiah and the title of his episode is called 'Truth,' because Sam obviously was ambivalent about the stars and stripes from the moment Steve handed it to him, right? We didn't want to free Sam of that. We wanted to make him deal with it and still decide to take up the mantle in the face of that."

And now that he has taken it on, Spellman will hopefully get to explore Sam's continued experience on the big screen.

All episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are available now on Disney+.

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