Put down the shield? Don’t think I will.
Deadline reports that Chris Evans, who seemingly bowed out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for good to hand over the Captain America mantle to Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson in Avengers: Endgame, is currently in talks to reprise his role as Steve Rogers in a future MCU project. What that means is anyone’s guess.
The capacity in which Evans would return is currently unknown, but the trade notes that the deal is currently for one new Marvel project — explicitly not a new Captain America movie — with the potential for another connected project beyond that. The role would seemingly be akin to Robert Downey Jr.’s appearances as Tony Stark in the Spider-Man movies co-produced by Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios.
In the run-up to Endgame, Evans had made it pretty clear that he thought his time in the role that shot him into the stratospheres of Hollywood over the past decade was at an end. More recently, the actor leaned into a more vague approach to potentially returning as the First Avenger, citing that the closure he felt Steve received in Endgame — returning through time and multiversal shenanigans to live a life of romantic bliss with a version of his first love, Peggy Carter — could be laid low by his return.
“It’s not a hard no, but it’s not an eager yes either,” the actor told fellow Marvel alum, Scarlett Johansson, in a November 2019 interview for Variety. “There’s other things I’m working on right now. And, you know, the worry is you don’t wanna…I think Cap had such a tricky arc to stick the landing, and I think they did a really nice job letting him complete his journey.”
Gizmodo has reached out to Marvel to comment on the report and will update this post if we hear back.