Will The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 2 Happen?

This article contains The Falcon and the Winter Soldier spoilers.

For the curious amongst us, gleaning information from Marvel about a second season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier these last few months has pretty much meant running into a series of brick walls. Ask anyone involved about the future of the show, which examines the legacy of Captain America and super soldiers through the lens of the latest man to wield the shield, Sam Wilson, and you’d get the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Before asking if The Falcon and the Winter Soldier season 2 will happen – presumably as Captain America and the Winter Soldier going forward – we should perhaps take a moment to appreciate the amount of work it took behind the scenes to deliver a first season. Production on that first season – now streaming in full on Disney+ – was interrupted by the pandemic last year and had to be finished up during a time of global fear and uncertainty.

Filming during the pandemic is no picnic, but it was especially trying when The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was adding its finishing touches. Star Anthony Mackie described the conditions on location in Prague as “rough.”

“Everybody’s very afraid of each other. The food is bad because they have to pack it up somewhere else and bring it to us in Ziploc bags. Yeah, it’s awful. You’re literally living in quarantine. It’s not like the NBA bubble where they had a barbershop and friends to hang out with,” Mackie told Entertainment Tonight, adding “No, if you get within six feet of somebody, there’s some little Czech dude coming and poking you with a stick saying, ‘You have to move.’ So it’s rough.”

Behind the Scenes

Not only that, it’s long been rumored that the plot of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier originally revolved around Karli and the Flag-Smashers threatening to unleash a deadly virus. If those rumors are even remotely true, you can only imagine the fast organizing that Marvel had to do in order to remold its latest gang of villains into one that made sense onscreen without trivializing the pandemic. Maybe some of the tonal problems of the series, and ultimately its struggle to fully flesh out a few of its political messages, developed as a result of all these changes and logistical problems.

When The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was heading for its March debut, Mackie and co-star Sebastian Stan were repeatedly asked if there would be a second season. Their answers were always mired in uncertainty, as were those of Marvel maestro Kevin Feige, whose predictable ‘magic 8 ball’ stock responses never gave anything away, but in an interview with IndieWire, Marvel Studios VP of Production & Development and FATWS executive producer Nate Moore probably vocalized what some of those people were thinking every time they were asked about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 2.

“We’ve definitely kicked around ideas because we always like to keep thinking about where things can go, but we also, frankly, in the crush of the pandemic, we’re just trying to finish the show and make sure it got out in a timely matter,” Moore explained, adding “Hopefully at the end of this season, you will see the potential for what we could tell in a subsequent season.”

Now we have witnessed the end of the first season, we can finally see what The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 2 might look like: the further adventures of Wilson and Barnes as Captain America and the Winter Soldier, righting wrongs and taking down bad guys in a complicated, post-blip world.

Captain America and the Winter Soldier

The first season of the show certainly left enough threads dangling that could be picked up in a second. Sam and Bucky could thwart Sharon Carter’s attempts to use her re-established role as a government agent to steal weapons and emerging technology, or get to the bottom of whatever Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine is up to with Wyatt Russell’s US Agent.

There are also plenty of other irons in the fire and a ton of options available to Marvel elsewhere if it decides not to pursue Captain America and the Winter Soldier. The Don Cheadle-starring Armor Wars, which tackles the misuse of tech left behind by the late Tony Stark, being one of them. Considering that Cheadle’s James Rhodes showed up for a brief appearance early in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s easy to imagine Mackie’s newly-minted Captain America returning the favor in Armor Wars. Secret Invasion – a Nick Fury-centric project about key MCU characters being replaced by Skrulls – could be another, and we’re dying to see JLD’s Valentina meet up with Samuel L. Jackson’s Fury.

Right now, Marvel is currently keeping its plans for Captain America and the Winter Soldier under wraps, but we’ll let you know as soon as that changes.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 2 Release Date

These shows are tremendous projects, and even though the pandemic has receded enough to allow TV and movie production to resume at roughly normal levels, we have to assume things are going to continue to move slightly more slowly than we’re accustomed to for a little while longer. Between this and the already increasingly crowded roster of upcoming Marvel TV shows on Disney+, we wouldn’t expect The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 2 (or Captain America and the Winter Soldier) to arrive until mid-2022 at the earliest.

Although, of course, shortly after we published this article news broke that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showrunner Malcolm Spellman is hard at work on co-writing Captain America 4 for the big screen, so it might be quite a bit longer before we see Sam and Bucky on Disney+ together again. Unless, of course, we need another FWS season to set up Cap 4. Time will tell…