Anthony Mackie: The Falcon Versus Twisted Metal

I have to admit he looks good in the outfit.

So…I know nothing about Twisted Metal beyond what little research I did for this article. It’s not my kind of driving game, a genre I’m worse at than fighting games unless I have actual car controls. I can…survive playing Cruisin’ USA in the arcades but would probably fail miserably on console like so many other driving games I’ve played, including one I have for my PC. It’s also a demolition derby game where the goal is to kill all your opponents. It’s not what I’m looking for. That’s my full disclosure.

Actor Anthony Mackie is a bit more familiar with it…because he’s staring in the series on Peacock in the US and apparently Paramount Plus in the UK, according to an interview with him for the Radio Times. I probably wouldn’t even have bothered except they also had to discuss another franchise he’s part of, playing Captain Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You’d think it would be poor form to ask about one character during a press junket/interview meant to promote a character from a different series, but I guess not. So while he was asked about John Doe (an amnesiac brought into the tournament the game is about) he also discussed playing Falcon for movies and Disney+.

It’s some of these comments I had the urge to push back against, because what he considers normal for the MCU is actually one of the reasons its failing, and it has nothing to do with politics. The “black Captain America” (and not the first one in comics) is not brought up. It’s more about making the MCU productions and not understanding the backstage reasons they don’t make money anymore, one that gets brought up by political and apolitical alike.

From the Radio Times interview:

Mackie speaks with infectious enthusiasm about Twisted Metal, the new TV series launching today on Paramount Plus in the UK, and he also gets candid about his journey with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And he shares his thoughts on the rise of video game adaptations.

Mackie admits that he isn’t exactly super-skilled when it comes to controlling the car combat of Twisted Metal, the brightly-coloured and action-packed game which first launched in 1995 for the original PlayStation. (It is still available on PS Plus if you want to give it a try on PS5 or PS4.)

The article began talking about how he grew up with Atari and moved to the NES while his friends were going with Colecovision. I’d have to doublecheck that timeline, or maybe it was his friends got Colecovision and he was still just using the Atari, presumably the 2600, until he got a Nintendo Entertainment System. He lists some games he played: usual suspects like Asteroids and Donkey Kong and something called Galaxy that I never heard of. The problem is so many people at these events clearly lie about this stuff that Mackie could be 100% truthful about his early gamer creds, as I’m sure plenty of Hollywood actors ARE gamers on the side or at least just enjoy playing them, and it’s hard to believe them. Folks, admit you know nothing about what you’re going into. You’re not the problem, the writers and directors are. It makes it easier to believe in the actual fans.

That’s not me questioning Mackie. That’s me wanting to make it easier to believe him and totally on everybody else.

Mackie recalls: “You know, I was not good at the game. I tried to play the game again — still suck at it. It used to frustrate the hell out of me.

“But I found the characters to be so interesting, just all the different descriptions. And, you know, which car was a better car, and the guns on the cars and all that stuff. But I was never good at it.”

Just another day out for Sam and the boys.

At least he admits to not being good at the game, in which we are alike, as far as me and driving games in general. Then again I couldn’t figure out how to move the Normandy in my last playthrough of Mass Effect and I only choose Iron Man and Mega Man as my Marvel Vs Capcom playing because I really like the characters. I’m not a good gamer is what I’m saying, but I do enjoy playing it. One of my favorite games is the original NES Ninja Gaiden and I suck at it royally. I’m surprised I finished Portal and there are a bunch of games I never fin…you really don’t care, do you?

He remembers: “Once I read (the pitch), I was really excited by the idea, because there’s no story to the video game. You know, it’s just like, ‘Shoot each other!’ But with this, I was really excited by the idea of creating the backstory and the characters and really making them three-dimensional and giving them a life.”

When we begin suggesting that his decade-long involvement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe must have prepared him well for the task of adapting a long-standing brand and trying to bring its pre-existing fans on board, Mackie is quick to shoot the idea down.

Mackie explains: “I would say the Marvel thing is completely different, just because it’s such a space of controlled entertainment. Like, there’s only so much you can do. There’s only so much creativity you can bring to the table, because Stan Lee gave us so much content.

Considering that there’s a producer at Marvel Studios insisting anyone involved know nothing about the comics going in, Echo was changed in every way possible (adding a handicap, tossing in Native America mysticism because Native American stereotype yet getting her tribe wrong, what her talents actually are), so all kinds of “creativity” was brought to the table, just now what Lee and other Marvel creators gave them to work with.

“Whereas with this [Twisted Metal], it was like, ‘There’s a guy and a girl… go!’ So we were really able to build the world around it.”

We suggest that the lack of story in the Twisted Metal games gives Mackie and his fellow producers the freedom to introduce characters, change characters and even kill off characters whenever they want.

Mackie responds: “Exactly. And that’s the hard thing about the Marvel universe. It’s like, you can’t really go outside of the lines of those comic books.

About that:

There totally is a story behind Twisted Metal. Even I knew about Calypso’s contest, and this video just covers the first game. John Doe is also a character from the games with his own reason for entering. From the Twisted Metal Fandom wiki entry on John:

John Doe was once in a gang of look-a-like thugs, low-life nobodies that that got by with random beatings and robbery. Determined to become well-known, the gang devised a plan: detonate a powerful bomb in the Midtown Center for Disease Control building, potentially spreading numerous diseases around the world. However, something happened to John which caused him to acquire amnesia, and he was sent to Blackfield Asylum afterwards. For a length of time, John and the doctors at the asylum were at a loss; no one could figure out who he was. One day, John gets a visitor, a man going by the name Calypso, who makes John an offer. If John competes in his contest, Calypso can show him the truth about who he truly is. He then shows John a picture of himself in a suit; nice and neat, like he’s actually somebody. Determined to find out who he is, John enters the contest, tired of spending the rest of life as a nobody.

If you win Twisted Metal Black you find out your identity and like most of Calypso’s victories it doesn’t go well for you. The character is thusly replaced one way or another in the next game, Twisted Metal Lost. I won’t spoil what happens but that wiki entry I linked to had the full story. That was a few minutes research to learn all of this. You still have to get characters right, but you can decide who wins and how Calypso either screws the winner over or in rare cases is the victim of his own hubris. They may have less to go with, but the MCU, even before Disney got rid of the continuity consultants, they weren’t doing adaptations of actual Marvel stories, just adapting the Marvel characters into their new continuity, while under Paramount’s distribution they at least tried to reflect the core concept, the multiversal continuity, of the characters they were working with while doing their own thing.

In the series he has a somewhat different story according to the wiki:

John Doe is the protagonist of the 2023 Peacock TV series Twisted Metal. John is an amnesiac like his previous incarnation. He is tasked by Raven to deliver a package across the Divided States of America to an unknown individual. If he does so successfully, he’ll get a chance at a better life. He used to drive a 2003 Subaru he named Evelyn, but after it was destroyed in an explosion caused by Preacher, he instead drives a junk car that Quiet, his partner, would name Roadkill.

I don’t know who any of those characters are, and I just found out “Sweet Tooth” is actually the name of the truck, not the driver. I guess the fans just went with what was on the selection screen. So maybe that’s why Mackie doesn’t know this backstory? Anyway, back to the interview.

“You know, when we introduced the Falcon, and the growth of the Falcon to Captain America, all of that had to coincide with what Stan had already gave us. So it’s an interesting juggle to be a part of that world. And this was more like, ‘Let’s just have fun and figure it out as we go.'”

I don’t have any Twisted Metal related images.

Except they didn’t. Even the comics have strayed from that. Stan Lee didn’t turn Falcon into Captain America. He didn’t even create Captain America, while Falcon was Sam Wilson’s own identity until he became Captain America #5 (collect them all), and that’s what Lee co-created with Gene Colan. Again, they’re ignoring the comics these days, so it’s not like the rules apply anymore.

“I think it’s because there’s a new generation,” he says. (referring to Twisted Metal again) “I mean, we’re looking back at our childhood and wanting to experience that with our kids. So we’re almost introducing our kids to what we were into when we were their age. So I think it’s just that perfect in-between sweet spot where everybody can relate to it.

Considering how Hollywood has taken stuff from our childhoods and twisted them (no pun intended) into something barely recognizable to unrecognizable, I don’t think he really knows what his bosses are doing. I know they don’t.

Mackie draws an interesting comparison to board games and toys: “Like, what’s the difference between Battleship and Barbie? Both of them are Mattel, both of them are huge [products], but one worked and one didn’t [on the big screen]. So I would be interested to see what exactly didn’t transfer with Battleship that did transfer with Barbie on such a huge scale.”

Battleship was a stupid idea to begin with and the end product did nothing to improve it. Barbie ignored previously established Barbie lore but knew the audience they were going for and had more to work with than “j-16” “you sunk my battleship”. It’s not hard to figure out what happened.

In Mackie’s words: “I don’t feel like it’s more pressure. I always liken Marvel movies to that opening scene in Grease. It’s like going to summer camp, you know? You go back, it’s the same people. Some people have gotten fatter, some people have kids, some people have less hair. Like, it’s always the same thing. You check in with people and it’s just fun.”

I have nothing to say about this one. I just found it silly. Not dumb or even negative, just weird.

He’ll next be seen in the MCU with Captain America: Brave New World. “We shot the next film,” he tells us, “and now because we had this big strike, it kind of delayed everything. So now we’re going in to do our reshoots, which isn’t a big deal.”

He added: “Every Marvel movie I’ve done has done between six weeks and three months of reshoots. It’s just how it works. All of these big budget superhero movies, all of them do reshoots.

Not to you. You got paid to make it and enjoyed doing so. All of these reshoots, which didn’t used to be a problem for superhero movies, are eating the budget so it makes it harder to make a profit off of, especially as the writing and adaptation quality both keep dropping in the MCU. Reshoots happen, but the amount that are done have become insane, and such a stress issue for the visual effects team since they end up with worse deadlines than your average manga creator, which is already terrible, to the point they unionized just to save their sanity. Does he even know what happens when he leaves the set? I guess being part of two ongoing series is too much of a distraction.

“When we did Endgame, we did like three months of reshoots, so it’s always a thing where you shoot what you have, get it in the editing, you see what you got, then you come back, and you make it better. So it’s just the way the process works.

“I mean, I’ve done, I guess, like eight Marvel movies now. And we’ve done reshoots on all of them. So we were going back in this summer, and seeing what we got and make it better.”

How many reshoots did you have making Twisted Metal, Anthony?

None of these issues are Mackie’s fault. I’m not trashing him for being “part of the problem” or any nonsense like that. I just found it interesting how naive he is about the current problems in the creative process.