Captain America: Civil War - 8 Ways It Could Ruin Everything

6. Overcrowding

Not content with having to balance the story between Captain America, Banner/Hulk, Romanoff, Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, Vision, and Nick Fury as in Age Of Ultron, Civil War's going to involve throwing in bulked-up roles for Falcon, Vision, War Machine and Scarlet Witch. Even given how much groundwork's been laid for those characters already, and how dextrously the previous films have managed it, that's a big ask.

Obviously if any franchise can support a ludicrously extensive supporting cast it's the Marvel Universe, but it does feel rather overambitious to expect to be able to build a satisfying narrative around so many strong characters without making the superhero equivalent of War & Peace.

The upshot of that might well be that the resulting mess would put everyone off Marvel for a while, each faction of the fandom peeved at its particular hero not getting enough screen time and not enough full-bodied characterisation and development to really make much sense to your average cinema-goer.

Having spent so much time making sure each character has a deep and satisfying backstory, to just toss off a perfunctory conclusion to an arc would be unfulfilling in the extreme; even worse, they could attempt to whack on a gratuitous bit of character development out of nowhere, just to keep things moving.