The fantastic first trailer for Captain America: Civil War dropped last week, spawning dissection of every detail, rampant speculation, a lot of feelings, and even an Adele mashup video. While the brutal Bucky and Cap vs Iron Man fistfight stole the show, the trailer also teased another full-scale superhero battle -- the big one, the main event, the "splash page" fight, as EW is calling it, which will see Tony and Steve go head to head, or fist to face, once again with their superhero supporters behind them.

The outlet was on set in Atlanta, Georgia during the filming of the big battle, and in their Civil War cover issue they're dishing out some details of the where, when and why it all goes down.


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Based on the Mark Millar-scripted Marvel Comics series Civil War, which debuted in 2006, the film sees the new Avengers introduced at the end of Age of Ultron pitted against one another in an ideological battle over the matter of government control. Cap, our patriotic idealist whose seen too much corrupted power in his day, leads those who resist a new motion to restrict and monitor the identities and abilities of super-powered individuals, while Tony fronts a team of heroes who support it. Their conflicting principles bring the former allies to blows in the form of all out warfare.

Joe Russo, who returns to direct alongside his brother Anthony Russo, describes,

“How do you move forward from a moment where people who used to love each other and were on the same side, now hate each other and are trying to hurt each other?”

As we reported back in August, Cap is backed by Ant-Man, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and of course, The Winter Soldier. Meanwhile, Tony has them sizably outgunned with Black Widow, Black Panther, War Machine, and some other unconfirmed heroes (looking at you, Vision). Spider-Man will play a part in there somehow, and if the movie follows the comic at all, there will be some defectors by the film's end, but for the purposes of this battle, the teams are set.

The report details the staging of the battle (poor Ant-Man):

While Black Widow gives an all-out thrashing to Ant-Man, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch blast away at the sky — him with his trusty bow and arrows, her with her mystical red energy pulses. They’re trying to knock some unseen threat out of the air. (It’s hard to tell which visual effect they’re imagining.)

 

It’s definitely not Iron Man. He’s flying low and locked onto another target: Captain America. Evans raises his shield, slings an upper cut through the air, and gets in one more hit against his invisible foe before he’s almost taken out in real life...The shot will end with Iron Man knocking Captain America to his knees. But he's not going to stay there.

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Image via Marvel

We knew there was going to be some inciting incident to set the superhero warfare into motion, and EW's report reveals that incident to be none other than a confrontation with Frank Grillo's Crossbones, the villainous SHIELD agent who we last saw at the end of The Winter Soldier lying battered under a fallen building. When the new Avengers set out to take him down for good, something goes terribly wrong and a lot of innocent lives are lost in the process.


Combined with the destruction the superpowered have wreaked in the Marvel movies to date -- like, you know, Hulk smashing through Manhattan or levitating the entire freaking population of Sokovia -- the powers have had enough, and they demand it's time to put people with powers in check. Turns out one of the public voices helping to form the new laws is the young leader of Wakanda, T'Challa, none other than the Black Panther fighting alongside Iron Man.

Chris Evans explained the complex, morally ambiguous conflict that anchors the film.

“In most of the movies, there’s no question who we should be siding with,...We all agree Nazis are bad, aliens from space are bad. But this movie’s the first time where you really have two points of view. There’s really no wrong answer here and it’s just a matter of who we are as men: Tony Stark and myself. Which side of the aisle do we come down on? So it’s hard for [Cap]. It becomes a question of morality and I don’t think he’s ever been so uncertain with what right and wrong is.”

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Image via Marvel

And as the trailer made very clear, at the heart of it all is Bucky and his friendship with, a friendship backed by history -- one of the last from his old life -- that costs him his relationship with Tony. Evans explains,

“No one on this planet knew him then. No one is left...He doesn’t have any peace with his youth. He doesn’t have any peace from his life, so Bucky and whatever happens with Bucky in this movie…That’s a big piece in terms of him kind of finding his own purpose in what he’s fighting for and how that friendship can come back to life. Not just them as soldiers, but them as friends.”

While the titular civil war is the prominent conflict of the film, it's clear that the other half, and leading part of that title, Captain America, is the anchor and through-line of the story. For now, we know a little bit more about how he will face off against his super-powered friends, but we'll have to wait until Civil War arrives in theaters May 6, 2016 to see who comes out victorious.