Captain America 4’s Ending Almost Had an Illuminati Tease

The post-credits scene of Captain America: Brave New World sure is…something, huh. Chances are you already know what it is, but if not, both it and what it could’ve been will be spoiled here.

At the end of the film, Sam Wilson visits the captured Samuel Sterns in the lower levels of the Raft. Sterns ominously tells Sam he knows what’s coming next, and intones that Sam won’t be prepared for attacks from other worlds and “the others.” Vague as it is, you can figure this concerns the multiversal business coming in Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars that everyone who isn’t Doctor Strange or Monica Rambeau is basically unaware of. But it seems at one point, those “others” may have been referring specifically to the Illuminati, Marvel’s collection of supergeniuses who made their MCU debut in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

In a recent interview with Brave New World director Julius Onah, TheWrap brought up the Illuminati, who it claims was in an earlier draft of the film and later cut during reshoots. (Later, scooper Alex Perez claimed they would’ve been a group of heroes from other worlds, unlike the Multiverse version all coming from Earth-838.) Onah stressed he couldn’t say specifically, but he did note that Sterns’ words “are purposely left vague in that post-credit for a reason.” And while the intent behind it apparently shifted, he said some kind of warning was always going to close out the film, since by then, Marvel had “a clearer picture of where things were going. The goal was to make sure that we were doing it at a time which, because of the strikes, nobody was writing.”

Why would the Illuminati have been in Brave New World? In the comics, Steve Rogers was part of the team, and previously clashed with them in the lead up to the multiverse-focused Secret Wars event in 2015. When he opposed their plans to build a weapon that could save their Earth at the cost of other universes, they wiped his memory, and when he eventually regained those memories, he used the Avengers to go after them. So there is some precedence to the Illuminati and a Captain America crossing paths—though that doesn’t stop their potential cameos in Brave New World from feeling as out of nowhere as Sterns’ declaration.

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