There’s a secret Captain America movie that might never be released

A Letterboxd user has seen Albert Pyun’s original cut of his 1990 Captain America movie, and calls it the director’s “most emotionally coherent” effort. The fan also fears the film might never see the light of day.

Captain America made his comic book debut in 1941. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the patriotic super-solider quickly became one of the most popular superheroes in the world, and was soon starring in equally popular movie serials for Republic Pictures.

But it would be decades before Cap starred in a celluloid feature, and it was a disaster, with Albert Pyun’s Captain America movie going straight-to-video, and widely derided by both critics and fans alike. Meaning it didn’t land a spot on our list of the best superhero movies of all time.

But a new cut of the director’s original vision has been found, and the result is apparently a marked improvement, with radically different structure and tone. First though, a bit of background…

The first version of The First Avenger

21st Century Film Corporation

The Cannon Group acquired the rights to Marvel’s Captain America in the 1980s, with plans to make a big-budget adaptation. Michael Winner was even attached to direct at one point.

When Cannon went bust, however, producers carried the film over to the 21st Century Film Corporation, where they fast-tracked the project to retain those rights.

Albert Pyun – who had recently helmed Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Cyborg for Cannon – would direct, working from a script by Stephen Tolkin.

21st Century Film Corporation

In an interview with FelxibleHead, Pyun said: “I grew up as a fan of the comic book so I had an interest in it and I’d heard that the script they already had for it was quite good. I read it and I liked it a lot; I particularly appreciated the fact that it was a period piece, set in the 1940s. I was looking forward to doing something with that.”

Matt Salinger – son of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ author JD Salinger – would play a very square-jawed Cap, Scott Paulin was cast as Red Skull, while Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty joined the ensemble in supporting roles.

What went wrong on Albert Pyun’s Captain America

But the budget was modest to begin with. Then that number was slashed during principal photography, meaning Pyun struggled to put his vision onscreen.

When asked about the experience by ComicBookMovies in 2011, Pyun said: “Strongest memories were sweating out whether there was enough cash to get through the day…eEveryone tried hard under terrible circumstances.”

While in that same FelxibleHead interview, Pyun details the financial issues, revealing that: “It was shot in Yugoslavia, and the funding never really materialized. The budget was supposed to be almost $4m, but the production company was never able to close the bank loan. It was quite a tense situation.

21st Century Film Corporation

“We couldn’t even afford film stock towards the end. The shoot happened one day with no film: we just pretended we were shooting, because we didn’t want to let people know that we’d run out of film and didn’t have the money to buy anymore!”

The film was then edited behind Pyun’s back, and the resulting debacle failed to secure a theatrical release in the US. Instead, Captain America was snuck out on video in 1992, and currently possesses a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 6%.

The return of Captain America

In 2011, to coincide with the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, Albert Pyun released a ‘Director’s Cut’ with approximately 14 minutes of new footage.

21st Century Film Corporation

But he hinted at more, telling FlexibleHead: “A couple of years ago I found my original 35mm cut of Captain America, and it’s much longer: it’s almost 130 minutes long, with a lot more scenes, which nobody had ever really seen it. It’s much, much different than the 90-minute version that was eventually released, which skips a lot of the character stuff.

“The version I did was much more of a character study, of the person that became Captain America, and his feelings about living up to that name… It was a much more emotional movie, and the action is better because it’s more in context.”

Everything new in the Original Cut

Now someone has actually seen that Albert Pyun edition of Captain America, and they want the rest of the world to be able to enjoy it.

Letterboxd user Justin Decloux writes: “Recently, a friend of Albert’s reached out and offered to send me a different cut of Captain America. Of course, I assumed it was going to be the Director’s Cut Albert put out on DVD himself more than a decade ago, which added in a few scenes but remained basically the same movie. How much could change? Holy cr*p. So much.”

Decloux watched this ‘Original Cut’ and described went down: “The film is presented at first as a mystery, starting with Captain America crashing a missile in Alaska and then jumping to the present as he wakes up a stranger in a strange land.

“He was supposed to be a hero, but he failed on his first mission, and now everything he knew is gone. It was supposed to be simple, but it wasn’t, and now he has no idea what to do. It’s a much more downbeat tone, with very little whiz-bang and a whole lot of ‘What was the point of it all?’ spread throughout.”

He continues: “You know all those WWII scenes in the theatrical release’s opening 30 minutes? In Albert’s Original Cut, they’re spread throughout the film as flashbacks in a non-linear order. 

“Instead of seeing the fight with the Red Skull by the rocket right at the start of the movie, it’s scattered throughout the film in clever ways, to the point that even in the climax, it intercuts the WWII Red Skull fight with the Present Day Red Skull fight!”

Decloux ends by saying this Pyun cut isn’t perfect, “doubling down” on much of what people disliked first time around. But he adds that “in his original cut you can see a genuine authorial intent guiding an impossible production, to the point that out of all of Albert’s films, it may be the most emotionally coherent.”

He concludes by hoping that “the complicated legal mess around the film,” can be untangled, so the that this original cut of Captain America can be released.

For more superhero stuff, here’s everything we know about Captain America 4, plus details of if Chris Evans will be in the sequel.