“Basically everybody at Marvel, other than Joe and I, they were mad at us because he came into the movie so late,” Anthony recalls with a laugh. “We thought it was the right spot to do it, but after a while we kind of gave into everybody's [demand]: 'We need more Cap.'”
“He had Thor's heroic entrance into the Wakanda battle, that was originally Cap,” Joe adds. ”Our thinking was, you know, he was on the run, that nobody could find him, and so we thought it would be this really compelling way to use the character, especially ‘cause we're trying to thin the ranks out so that we could track everyone. Then we realized we had a really good spot to bring him in earlier in Scotland to save Vision and Wanda. So we started moving around heroic moments for characters.”
For the Russos, the choice harkened back to the point of human emotion and fallibility, illustrating the divide amongst the heroic team that ultimately lead to their downfall.
“The premise of the movie for us was always that, because of what happened in Captain America: Civil War, because Cap and Tony had the falling out, because the Avengers are divided, this is why they lose to Thanos,” Anthony explains. “[We were] playing with this idea that it's hard for Tony and Cap to get back together on the same team, and having Cap sort of be late to the party because they are forced to live underground and in hiding from the government. That was always the basic premise of the movie.”