Falcon And Winter Soldier Stars Get Candid About The 'Competition Within Marvel'

For months, all anyone could talk about in relation to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was WandaVision. With so many lingering questions, the series definitely set the bar high for what Marvel shows on Disney+ should be able to accomplish. After a successful run, WandaVision passed the baton to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which got things moving in an interesting direction by the end of its first episode, when the United States government unveiled a new Captain America would be taking over the mantle. 

The show threw down the gauntlet in a pretty impressive manner, as it had the biggest debut out of any Disney+ series to date. 1.7 million households watched in its first weekend as opposed to the 1.6 million who watched WandaVision over the same period of time (via Deadline). That certainly gives the show's stars, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, some bragging rights, but with Disney, you never know how long a record's going to last. Loki is right around the corner, and there's a slew of other Marvel projects in the pipeline like Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk. 

It remains to be seen how much viewership The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will retain in the coming weeks, but as Mackie and Stan revealed in a recent interview with SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Podcast with Julia Cunningham, they're pretty confident they'll stay on top when it comes to the healthy rivalry that takes place at Marvel Studios. 

Congratulations were in order at the start of the interview upon the news that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had the biggest premiere out of any Disney+ series, but Mackie seemed to realize that could all change very soon. He said, "Now the problem is, you know, when Loki comes out, you know, you know, I mean, we're kind of Teflon right now. So there is competition within Marvel." Since Loki is arguably the most popular villain in the MCU, it's easy to see a scenario where a ton of households tune in to see what the trickster god is up to in his new series. 

It's impossible to predict the future, but there's one other metric Mackie's interested in judging his new show by: "There is competition. I just, if they, I would want to see somebody do an algorithm or figure out if we were at a movie theater, how much money we would have made. Cause I know it would have been more than Tom Holland as Spider-Man." That's a pretty big claim, especially considering Spider-Man: Far From Home grossed $92.5 million in its opening weekend (via Box Office Mojo). 

However, the poking fun at Holland's expense is all friendly. With so many Marvel projects out there and in the works, it's only natural for each actor to want their superhero to be the most well loved, and at the end of the day, it probably just makes for better performances, since no one wants to be the weak link in the franchise. To Holland's credit, it's pretty hard to imagine much anything doing better than the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home, which promises to bring the multiverse into the MCU. It may just blow everything else Marvel has done out of the water.