Batman v Superman Motivated Marvel To Make Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War is getting a lot of praise from critics and fans so far. It will most likely get a higher Rotten Tomatoes aggregate score than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but if Warner Bros. didn't announce the team-up superhero DC film, Marvel probably wouldn't have Civil War this year. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, co-director talked about how Batman v Superman pushed them to work on something larger: "And after they announced Batman v. Superman, he said, 'you guys are absolutely right.' We needed to do something challenging with the material or we were going to start to lose the audience."

Russo also discussed the change in storytelling approach for Civil War:

"Well, it helps that we're working within a very popular genre. But I also think social media has altered viewing habits and tastes. The quality of tentpole movies has gotten very good and very competitive over the last couple years. Because of social media and the discussion that happens there, the audience has gotten a stronger collective sense of taste and you're dead at 6 p.m. on Friday if you didn't make a good movie. And they're starting to champion more radical storytelling."

Russo went on to talk about how they decided to create a story that would shake up the traditional Marvel formula:

"Deadpool's a great example of that. I mean, holy shit, $750 million worldwide? For our part, when we finished Winter Soldier two years ago and we were thinking about doing the next one, the only thing that seemed interesting to us was to deconstruct the Marvel Universe — because where else can we go at this point? There have been 11 or 12 movies so far, all with a fairly traditional structure. Our pitch to them was: People will tell you they love chocolate ice cream — until you give it to them five days a week. It's time to give them some rainbow sherbet. Kevin [Feige] is a maverick and he's very sensitive to how people are responding to his content. He said he thought we might be right."

And they ended up being right. Civil War will show us a conflict between superheroes with different views --something we've never really seen done in an epic scale before. Critics who have seen the movie showered it with praise.

Captain America: Civil War will hit theaters on May 5, 2016.

Watch: Awesome Spider-Man Footage in The New Captain America: Civil War TV Spot