Elizabeth MinkelCultureFeb 14, 2025 7:00 AM

10 Years After ‘Stucky,’ Captain America: Brave New World Signals a Big Shift in Marvel Fandom

Spurned fanfic shippers, political protests, and a Black superhero long sidelined by fans and Marvel alike: What the release of Captain America: Brave New World says about the MCU in 2025.Still from Captain America: Brave New WorldPhotograph: Eli Adé/MarvelSave this storySaveSave this storySave

There’s a new Captain America movie out this Valentine’s Day. This probably isn’t news to anyone—after all, the new trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, in which Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson officially steps into the Cap role, aired during the Super Bowl. And millions will head to theaters this weekend to see the film, whose cast also includes Harrison Ford as Red Hulk (imagine the regular green one, but red).

A decade ago, “a new Captain America movie on Valentine’s Day” would have held a different cultural weight. At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was arguably at its pop-cultural apex. And in a rare alignment between the fan-fiction world and the mass media one, Captain America was at the root of one of fandom’s “juggernaut ships”: Stucky.

Using a portmanteau of Steve (Rogers, the old Cap) and Bucky (Barnes, his childhood best friend turned brainwashed super-assassin), the Stucky fandom’s romantic fics took off in the wake of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In the years that followed, they produced some of the most influential fan works ever created, and their stories remain popular.

When Captain America: Civil War hit theaters in 2016, it made nearly $180 million domestically; Brave New World is on track to make a little more than $90 million this weekend. Critical reception of the film, as of this writing, has been lackluster. The contrast between the frenzy of the first Captain America trilogy and the far more muted reception of its new iteration offers a complicated snapshot of the current moment in fandom and pop culture.

Broadly, it signals bigger trends: audiences weary of both superheroes and never-ending franchises, increasingly dispersed communities of fan creators, and the arguable end of “juggernaut ships.” More specifically, Brave New World enters the zeitgeist with a Black superhero long cast aside in favor of white characters by both fans and the franchise itself, while also facing a boycott from some fans due to the inclusion of an Israeli character who was originally a Mossad agent in the comics.

If there’s one thing that’s true about the MCU in 2025, it’s that there’s a lot of it. Brave New World is the 35th big-screen installment to be released in a mere 17 years—and that’s not including all the television shows. Introduced in the comics in 1969, Sam Wilson made his onscreen debut in Winter Soldier as Steve Rogers’ modern-day best friend. After supporting roles in subsequent films, his first star turn was as the titular Falcon in the 2021 Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; now, he headlines the first Captain America movie in nine years.

As the titles in the MCU and other big franchises have piled up, the quality of the films has fallen off—and audience enthusiasm has fallen off with it. In the 2020s, franchises have been contending with increasingly fractured media consumption patterns caused by everything from Covid-19 to TikTok to political chaos. Still, studios seem to churn out constant “content”—movies and shows mired in a vast array of characters presented in connected, multiverse-heavy storylines. Viewers, forced into an all-or-nothing situation, have to follow along with every single installment or feel lost. Last year, Disney CEO Bob Iger vowed to slow the company’s output of Marvel films, but it seemed as though burnout had already set in.

“It’s hard to hold eight films in your head at once with 50 interlocking characters,” says JSA Lowe, an adjunct professor of film and literature at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. She offers the linguistic term “semantic depletion” for thinking about the MCU and other big franchises that have pushed out nonstop installments in recent years. “With each iteration, something can get more watered down,” she says. “You can retcon your retcons, but at a certain point, you lose the audience’s engagement—you lose their willingness to keep entertaining these iterations.”

At the height of the franchise, Lowe was a Captain America fan (and especially a Sam Wilson fan). She cites Winter Soldier as one of the few MCU titles that stands alone well enough to teach in the classroom now—and that she thinks will be teachable in a decade, too. (Another is 2018’s Black Panther, which she taught in a mythology class last semester.)

That self-contained-ness—and the bigger world the film gestures to but doesn’t fully spell out—was also a key reason why Winter Soldier was such fertile ground for fans making transformative works a decade ago. “We would pour over screen caps from the film,” says a writer with the pen name tigrrmilk who is behind a number of Stucky fics and collaborated on “Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film,” one of the most popular fan works of the era. “We called it the Citizen Kane of Tumblr,” she jokes. “There was always more to discover, and there was a lot of really nerdy, fandomy close reading.”

Setting aside the perpetual exception that is Harry Potter, many big fic fandoms of earlier eras came out of cult-favorite shows like Stargate Atlantis or Due South. Captain America fandom’s contemporaries were more in tune with mainstream audiences—Sherlock, Teen Wolf, and Supernatural chief among them—but none were at the scale of the MCU. Like other big fandoms of the era, its sheer size meant there were many corners to explore and various thematic niches. “There was so much happening,” says tigrrmilk. “It really was a behemoth, in a way that I’ve really not experienced with other things.”

Even with all those various niches, the dominant force in the fandom was Stucky. Consistently one of the most popular ships across fandoms in the 2010s, Stucky fans wrote epic fics that swept through the history of the 20th century and played with ideas of politics and identity. Around the release of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, fans tweeted the hashtag #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend, pushing the idea of the ship beyond the pages of Archive of Our Own (AO3) and onto the radar of the broader pop-culture world. By the time Steve Rogers bowed out of the franchise in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, many fans felt the relationship—even the friendship—of Steve and Bucky had been deliberately downplayed in response to the ship. His trip back in time to live out the latter half of the 20th century with Peggy Carter left some fans feeling downright betrayed.

Regardless of how the franchise handled the characters onscreen, the Stucky ship continued to flourish in fan works. Writers still pen stories about them to this day. Lowe was initially drawn into the world by the onscreen relationship between Steve and Sam, but she often found herself reading Stucky due to the large volume of high-quality work. (She had a particular weakness, she notes, for the fandom’s tendency to write Bucky Barnes as Jewish.)

Sam Wilson, she explains, was often sidelined in Captain America and Avengers fan works, regularly cast in the role of providing free therapy for traumatized white characters. The fandom’s treatment of Wilson and other Black characters has been long discussed by fans—and that’s a discussion that continues as Wilson takes on the Cap mantle in the films. Last month, AO3 announced it would be splitting the Captain America tag into “Chris Evans” and “Anthony Mackie” versions (with the more than 100,000 existing Captain America works sorted by default into the former category). The decision immediately sparked condemnation—questions of “who asked for this?” and commentary of “separate but equal.”

That fandom sidelining is an echo of the franchise’s treatment of the character, too. Kelsey White, a longtime Sam Wilson fan—or as she puts it, “fanatic”—says Mackie’s introduction into the cinematic universe got her back into comics. “I was living for the Black representation and couldn’t wait to see Winter Soldier,” she says. “Saying I was in love is an understatement. They made a Black man be emotionally intelligent and made that how he bonded with Steve.”

But she notes that even as Sam ostensibly had a more central role in the franchise in recent years, it was hard to see evidence of that onscreen—or in the franchise’s promotion and marketing. “As a POC, you tend to hope and pray that you can get merch of the characters that look like you,” White says, but she has found little for Wilson or Brave New World from the usual distributors. “Come on. It’s Black History Month and you can’t get your teams together to celebrate Sam Cap?”

It’s been widely observed that for Marvel, franchise fatigue—and the flagging quality of the studio’s projects—set in just as they finally diversified their leading roster after hanging up the jerseys of its beloved white male heroes in Endgame. “For Anthony Mackie, that’s unfortunate,” says Lowe. “The time is just not right—and that’s not on him. That’s not even on the production. It’s just that history has marched on.”

Brave New World in particular is also facing a boycott from fans. First called for by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which leads a range of economic-focused actions against Israel, the boycott is a response to the film’s inclusion of the Israeli comic character Sabra, an agent in Israel’s intelligence organization Mossad. While the character’s name and backstory have been changed for the film, the movie’s Hollywood premiere on Tuesday was met with in-person protests. Many fans, it seems, are looking to sit this one—and even the broader franchise—out. These geopolitical discussions also connect to critiques of the MCU’s relationship with the US Department of Defense, long a point of discussion within the fandom but thrust into mainstream focus when 2018’s Captain Marvel was used for Air Force recruitment.

Bad critical reviews or ambivalence around the source material aren’t necessarily impediments to fan creators—just look at the continued dominance of Harry Potter in the fan-fiction space. But the relatively muted cultural response to newer Marvel titles also reflects just how much fan culture has changed in the past decade. Transformative fandom is far, far larger than it was at the start of the MCU, but compared to the early Captain America era, fans are more disparate, spreading their interests across a much wider range of source material.

Many fans also spend less time in one place, cycling through a fandom for a few months, even weeks, before moving on. The deep, sustained interest in a world that fueled so much Captain America fic in its heyday is harder to find now, especially at scale. With so much content across film and television, fans barely have time to latch on to anything—or to spin up their own versions of the characters and their worlds in the gaps.

Early box-office projections suggest Brave New World will do well for Marvel, potentially putting it on track with the opening performance of Winter Soldier. Like all entertainment corporations, money is the key metric for Marvel and its parent company, Disney. Whether they’re creating space for fan creativity doesn’t particularly matter if the numbers are still there. But for fans, the return of Captain America to the big screen is a moment to reflect on past eras and see just how much has changed. They’ll have to do it quickly—there are only 10 weeks until the next MCU title, Thunderbolts*, hits theaters in May.