Marvel’s 2006 event comic event “Civil War” was one of the company’s biggest ones, scoping across the entire Marvel universe. Pretty much every single Marvel hero who was alive and on Earth at the time was involved in one way or another, whether in the main books or in their own spinoff series. At the time, “Civil War” received universal critical acclaim for completely shattering and reshaping the Marvel universe and presenting a fresh new perspective on the hero vs hero conflict (remember – up until that point, the classic formula of hero vs hero fights involved only fighting for a bit before teaming up against a bad guy, and there was no bad guy in sight during “Civil War”). While fan opinion on the story is more mixed these days (and with good reason – some of the content within is pretty questionable), the fact that its 2016 movie adaptation holds a 90% on “Rotten Tomatoes” just goes to show that the core of the storyline still works ten years later. But obviously the Marvel Cinematic Universe is much different from the Marvel Comics Universe, so why don’t we take a closer look at both stories and compare the similarities and the differences? Be warned – there will be plenty of spoilers ahead!
For all of the differences to the source material, there’s also a lot of symbolic similarities to the comic books, too – for example, both the movie and the comic open with a young hero screwing up and accidentally causing a catastrophe. In the movie, that hero is the newest Avenger Scarlet Witch, who mistakenly sends suicide bomber Crossbones into a building full of people. In the comics, though, the perps are a little-known team known as the New Warriors who decide to take on a team of supervillains way out of their league while being filmed for a reality TV show, and as a result cause an explosion that kills hundreds of people, including dozens of children. The result is the same, though – the government passes a bill which requires superheroes to take responsibility for their actions. But the law in question is also different – in the movies, the Sokovia Accords is limited only to the Avengers and sets to essentially turn them into a private UN task force. As a result, heroes operating outside of the Avengers (such as Daredevil or Jessica Jones) wouldn’t really face any repercussions for their crime fighting other than maybe being charged with vigilantism (as if any superhero was ever sent to jail for that), which isn’t the case in the comics, where the Superhuman Registration Act applies to every superpowered individual. It requires them to not only start working as, essentially, agents of SHIELD, but to also register their secret identities within a SHIELD database – a database which can, potentially, be hacked, thus placing their loved ones in danger.
In both the movie and the comics, Iron Man starts supporting the law after a mother confronts him and blames him for the death of her son, while Captain America becomes a fugitive after choosing to oppose him. In both mediums, there are scenes in which the heroes are this close to reaching a solution, only to have it all go to hell, but other than that, the similarities in the first act are few and far in between. Characters that are prominent in the movie, such as Black Panther, barely show up in the comics, and characters with huge roles in the comics, like Spider-Man (who reveals his secret identity to the world in support of the Superhuman Registration Act) only shows up in the movie for one fight scene. Bucky, the Winter Soldier, isn’t present in the comics at all, while he’s the driving force of the movie. The first big superhero fight scene is also very different – in the movie, Tony’s team of heroes corner Cap’s at the airport, while in the comics Cap is lured to a burning factory. Both fights end with a member of Cap’s team growing gigantic (Ant-Man in the movie and Goliath in the comics), but while Ant-Man is defeated “Empire Strikes Back”-style in the movie, Goliath is killed by a clone of Thor in the comics. In the movie, the only casualty of the fight is Rhodey, who survives, but loses the use of his legs.
While in the movie Captain America manages to escape, at the cost of most of his team, in the comics Tony’s team is so shocked by Goliath’s death that they pretty much let Captain America and most of his team escape. From then on, a lot of heroes change sides – Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman, is disgusted by Tony Stark’s actions and leaves her family in order to support Captain America, while several of Steve’s teammates leave out of fear of ending up dead or on the run for the rest of their lives. In the movie, the only person who switches sides is Black Widow, who betrays Tony’s team and then disappears. In both mediums, Cap’s teammates (at least the ones that refuse to register) are imprisoned – in the comics, they’re locked up in a special prison in another dimension (because comics), while in the movie the prison is simply underwater.
That prison is precisely where the comics sets its climax, where Captain America manages to release all of his teammates, beginning a final offensive against Iron Man’s forces. The movie never quite tops the spectacle of the airport fight, though, instead preferring for a simpler, more emotionally-packed fight between Iron Man and Cap & Bucky. The fights, and subsequently the stories, end completely differently – in the movie, Steve manages to completely overwhelm his friend, literally and figuratively breaking his heart before leaving his shield behind, busting his teammates out of prison and forming the Secret Avengers with them. In the comics, though, in the midst of battle Steve realizes that they’re just fighting for the sake of fighting and not to protect the people like they’d swore to do, so he surrenders to the authorities and is later assassinated on his way to his trial. If you ask me, that might have been a stronger ending for the movie, but I guess they wanted to leave Cap alive for “Infinity War” (not that anything has ever stopped Marvel from bringing people back from the dead before).
Anyway, I hope you had fun learning about all the differences between the comic and the movie! Obviously, since we’re talking about two entirely different universes I couldn’t list every single little thing, but this should give you a pretty good idea and allow you to brag to your friends when you go and see the movie again for the third time.