Captain America: The Winter Soldier will bring a significant shift to the Marvel movie universe

Joe Russo: It’s a little bit of a sequel to both. I mean obviously the character has advanced. He’s been frozen for seventy years. It has narrative elements that tie to the first movie and it has narrative elements that tie directly to The Avengers and also has narrative elements that tie directly to Avengers 2. I think, and Kevin [Feige] has said this, it’s as big of a bridge of any of the Phase 2 movies from Avengers to Avengers 2. There’s a significant shift in the universe at the end of this movie. Like all of the Marvel movies it has elements of all of the other films, this one I think has probably the strongest bond between those goals.

/Film: That suggests that you have a lot of structural Marvel Universe stuff to do while you’re also crafting character-centric action.

JR: The interesting thing about that is that the script was structured so well that it’s not really something that… The things that happen in the movie are really germane to the movie and germane to Cap. The big shift in the universe happens because of him. It’s not something where we had to feel like we had to patchwork in all of these other narrative elements, it’s really Markus and McFeely wrote an amazing script that really streamlined this concept that Kevin wanted to get out there.

Anthony Russo: And it’s very personal to Cap, too. I think that’s the other thing, even though it’s a big event that connects it to the rest of the universe, it’s very much Cap’s relationship to that and we enter the whole thing through him. So it’s all riding on his shoulders and in terms of his experience at this moment with this movie.