Anthony & Joe Russo Explain Why No Avengers Died In 'Captain America: Civil War'

Despite the fact that most of The Avengers went head-to-head in Captain America: Civil War, not one of them died. Sure, War Machine (aka James Rhodes) walked away with a bit of a physical impairment, but that's about as bad as it got for our heroes. However, directors Anthony & Joe Russo confirm that they once talked about killing off various characters in the sequel, including Captain America himself.

Find out why no Avengers died in Captain America Civil War after the jump.

Captain America: Civil War recently held a screening to kick off a campaign for some awards this coming season, and afterwards directors Anthony & Joe Russo answered some questions from the audience. One question asked why none of the signature superheroes died in this movie, and the Russos gave their reasoning (via HitFix), along with some insight from Kevin Feige as well:

Anthony: We never talked about killing Cap in this one, right? No.

Joe: We did for a beat. We talk about everything.

Anthony: I think the thing to remember is, we do talk about every possible scenario over and over and over again for months and months and months. We talked about it. But it never made its way into a realistic outline.

Kevin Feige: Well, the ending was always more about fracturing the team completely before getting into Infinity War.

Joe: We talked about lots of potential characters dying at the end of the movie. And we thought that it would undercut what is really the rich tension of the movie, which is this is Kramer vs Kramer. It's about a divorce. If somebody dies, it would create empathy, which would change and allow for repair, and we didn't want to do that.

Kevin Feige: In the amazing comic book story, which certainly the conceit of this movie is based on and some of the specifics — during their big battle, which has a hundred times as many characters, a character dies. And we talked about that for a while. And, ultimately, we thought what happened to Rhodey would be enough of a downer.

Anthony: The tragedy is the family falls apart. Not that the family falls apart and then somebody dies.

So it's The Avengers as an entity that dies. The team is fractured. The world is left without Earth's mightiest heroes to keep the us safe. That sounds like the perfect opportunity for someone like Thanos to show up with the Infinity Gauntlet to kill millions.

We already know that The Avengers will come together to save the planet, but it might not necessarily be easy after everything that unfolded in Civil War. Even though Steve Rogers reassured Tony Stark that he could always call if he needed help, we know Stark's not exactly one to swallow his pride and ask for assistance. It will certainly be interesting to see how the events of Civil War have an impact on what happens in Infinity War.