Who will die first: Tony or Cap?

As we’ve been noting for a while, Avenger’s Infinity War Fever is HEATING UP. We’re doing our very own MCU Rewatch, and, with the main players’ contracts running out after Avengers 4 next year, the question is being asked: WHO WILL DIE, WHO WILL LIVE?

Chris Evan’s Captain America is done after Avengers 4. Evans makes this clear in a lengthy and human profile in the NY Times that is illustrated by an alarming photo of Evans with a Mario Bros. moustache. It also reveals he likes to tap dance.

Chris Evans has a theory about tap dancing. “Tap is waiting to have its day,” he said one recent afternoon, sitting in a TriBeCa hotel clubhouse around the corner from an apartment he’s been renting since last month. Mr. Evans, or Captain America, as he’s been known in omnipresent Marvel movies for the better part of a decade, tapped as a child and still has sincere reverence for the form. His theory is that tap dancing today, like competitive hip-hop dancing in the early 2000s, is generally undervalued and ripe for a comeback.

Perhaps he will spend more time tap dancing as he moves into Life After Cap:

And then there are the Avengers movies, in which the nobility of Mr. Evans’s character is so unimpeachable that entire plotlines turn on the ticks of his moral compass. In the TriBeCa lounge, Mr. Evans volunteered his own stereotype: “Taciturn men who are leaders, selfless and magnanimous.”

Last year, he filmed back-to-back the final two Marvel movies for which he is under contract — “Avengers: Infinity War,” due in April, and a sequel planned for next year. For now, he has no plans to return to the franchise (“You want to get off the train before they push you off,” he said), and expects that planned reshoots in the fall will mark the end of his tenure in the familiar red, white and blue super suit.

This version of Captain America will be done after Avengers 4, but what about Tony Stark? As we noted in our Iron Man 3 recap, despite being done after the third Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. has stuck around to star in four more movies. But Megan Purdy has a long Tony-lysis piece that demands Tony Stark Needs to Die in Avengers: Infinity War

It’s understandable that Marvel Studios would be reluctant to keep Tony around, of course. Iron Man isn’t just the character who launched the MCU; he’s become, and remains, the MCU’s anchor. That, and his toys still sell pretty well. But 3 phases and 18 films later, that anchor isn’t keeping the studio steady anymore. These days, it’s holding the MCU back. It’s time for Tony Stark to die.

The Stark narrative in all those films is often the same one, Purdy points out, and it’s time to break the cycle:

Decades of Iron Man comics, and now a decade of Iron Man and Avengers films, have mined that transformation. Tony’s story is, in every universe and iteration, one of perpetual redemption. He’s a man whose worst enemy is his own past, and often present, self; a man forever trying to claw his way up from villain to hero and make something good of all the bad he’s done. But because of his deep sense of guilt, and his propensity to make the same mistakes over and over again, it’s a redemption that will never be complete — as long as he’s still living, that is.

Two pretty big targets for death but what about Thor? Maybe he’ll just keep losing more body parts. Hemsworth just signed up for a Men in Black reboot with Tessa Thompson – Valkyrie and Thor having such agreat chemistry already – so he’s clearly ready for another franchise.

It’s going to be a very different world in summer 2019, isn’t it?