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Captain America: Brave New World has arrived, jumpstarting the MCU as it starts to make its final push towards 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars. The first feature showcasing Sam Wilson’s Captain America (Anthony Mackie) is, according to filmmakers, looking back to 1970s political thrillers for inspiration, just as 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier — you know, the best of the Steve Rogers Cap movies — did. Which made us wonder: what if people decided to skip the superhero stand-ins and go for the real thing? With 2025 feeling like all the dystopian fears of the ‘70s are coming to fruition for a significant portion of the population, maybe it’s time to present, for your consideration, a 1970s political paranoia primer.

This is For Your Consideration, in which we try to come to terms with the inescapable fact that, honestly, there’s too much out there to have time to watch, read, or hear everything — by making some suggestions about things that you might have overlooked but would enjoy, anyway. Think of it as recommendations from a well-meaning friend.

Before there was the MCU’s SHIELD, there was the Parallax Corporation

If you’re looking for a movie that puts a secret organization at the heart of the big events unfolding on the world stage, then maybe it’s not the MCU’s SHIELD that you’re after, but the Parallax Corporation, the shady “security” company at the center of Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller The Parallax View. Warren Beatty stars as Joe Frady, an investigative reporter who starts looking into the suspicious death of his ex-girlfriend only to end up uncovering the existence of a corporation that basically exists to kill people and shape the future of American politics.

Paranoid to such a degree that it feels almost too cynical, yet oddly prescient in the corporatization of government functions and the lack of transparency surrounding very important things (DOGE, anyone?), The Parallax View is perhaps the ideal entry point into the post-Watergate-scandal political thriller genre of the 1970s. Also, surely we’re due for Warren Beatty to show up in a Marvel movie before too long, right…?

The Conversation is what happens when the man behind The Godfather makes the anti-Marvel story

In many ways, the 1970s political thriller genre is the very opposite of the MCU in terms of its overall messaging, because Marvel movies are essentially the story of how an individual, or a group of dedicated individuals, can change things and save the day if their intentions are pure — and 1970s political thrillers, more often than not, are about the fact that it’s very rare for one person to make a difference when the weight of the establishment is pushed against them.

1974’s The Conversation is a great example of this; Harry Caul (Gene Hackman, never better) is a surveillance expert who accidentally uncovers something that might be a plan to do something very bad indeed… but that discovery just sets up a path that slowly pulls him into a conspiracy that overwhelms him and leaves him powerless to do anything other than watch from a distance. Written and directed by The Godfather’s Francis Ford Coppola, the screenplay was written in the late ‘60s but coincidentally relies on much of the same technology that the Nixon administration used on political opponents, which ultimately led to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation… which arrived just months after this movie debuted in theaters. 

Based on a true story, Nixon’s downfall at the hands of the press helped shape Hydra’s MCU rise

If the last two movies — released around the time that the Watergate scandal was unfolding in newspapers and on television on a daily basis — danced around the final fate of President Richard Nixon, All the President’s Men embraces it. The 1976 movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman dramatizes the reporting that broke the story in the first place, and manages to straddle the line between cynicism and disbelief at how bad things had gotten with the heroic myth that right will ultimately prevail if people keep the faith and do their jobs… which, if you think about it, makes it pretty much the model for a contemporary Captain America movie.

This movie is, of course, specifically cited as inspiration for 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier — so much so, in fact, that Redford was hired to play the movie’s ultimate villain. I like to think this means that there’s a Dustin Hoffman somewhere in the MCU currently toiling away to ensure that the Hydra agenda is still underway in some small way, waiting to be uncovered in a future movie…

Captain America: Brave New World is in theaters February 14.

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