“No, the way it works at Marvel is… I’m sure at some point somebody will talk in detail about this, but part of Kevin [Feige]’s brilliance is that there isn’t really a plan. There’s an idea, but you can’t have a plan if the movie you’re making tanks. There’s no plan after that, right?”
“So it’s really about, as the movie succeeded, then there was sort of enthusiasm about, ‘Well, what else could we do?’ And then that’s when new ideas would come out, right? And there were hopes, we hope one day we can get to the story if you keep doing this, right? Maybe we can all get there, you know, like Infinity War and Endgame, but a lot of the stuff was made up in between the movies, right?”
And… I think [those] call-forwards or callbacks were thought of after the fact, right? Like we didn’t have Civil War [broken down] and we didn’t know that by showing you the scene with Zola as this old Hydra villain in Winter Soldier… [and he’s] telling him about the Winter Soldier and there’s an image of Stark’s parents, right? He had them killed… And it’s implied that it’s connected. That was happenstance. Then, after the movie came out, and we had to make Civil War, we’re like, ‘Hey, that’s a crazy idea… that’s how Tony could get so angry at Cap that he’d want to kill him, is if Cap’s buddy had killed his parents.’
