Brave New World’ Team Planted ‘Two-Thirds Of A Football Field-Sized Worth Of Cherry Blossom Trees’ For The Film’s Destructive Climax

By Khumaer Bayas On Feb 21, 2025

Courtesy of Marvel Studios.

Between the end of March and the beginning of April, visitors to Washington, D.C. will be able to witness the annual bloom of the city’s cherry trees. If you can’t make it out to for the limited floral event, don’t worry — Marvel Studios has you covered with the climax of Captain America: Brave New World (now playing in theaters everywhere), which heavily features the light-pink blossoms synonymous with the nation’s capital.

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the MCU film!***

In said denouement, President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford taking over from the late William Hurt) transforms into Red Hulk after years of ingesting pills loaded with gamma radiation provided to him by big-brained baddie Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson). Naturally, the president’s behemoth form goes on a destructive rampage that ends with a final confrontation with Captain America (Anthony Mackie) at Hains Point, one of the premiere spots to appreciate D.C.’s cherry blossoms.

Since the MCU production couldn’t just shut down parts of the city during one of its busiest tourism windows, they simply had to make their own facsimile. “Almost two-thirds of a football field-sized worth of cherry blossom trees was built on a backlot in Atlanta,” production designer Ramsey Avery reveals over Zoom. “We actually shot the destroyed version first because it takes more time to build all that destruction in. We had an un-destroyed version underneath the destroyed version, shot the destroyed version, pulled out the destroyed parts, revealed the un-destroyed version underneath of it, and then brought in some trees that weren’t destroyed to replace the destroyed trees.”

He continues: “Building a whole field of cherry trees is not something that’s simple and easy to do. We had great people who were able to come [to set] every day with the excitement and passion to get all that done.”

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

Recreating Washington, D.C. in Atlanta

Despite Atlanta’s reputation as a major production Hollywood hub, it doesn’t have as many diverse backdrops as Los Angeles. “Trying to figure out how to how to create all of those worlds in Atlanta was tricky,” Avery admits.

“It took a lot of location scouting. I spent a lot of time in a car with Ilt Jones, the great location manager, driving within an hour of everywhere in Atlanta to try to find the parts and pieces … Then we definitely wanted to get to D.C. because nothing looks like Washington, D.C. It’s a very specific city, in that it has very specific rules about how architecture is built, how far things can be spread apart, and how tall things have to be. It has a look like no other city in the world. So we needed to get our exteriors in D.C. and went there to get … some of the traveling shots [as well as]

Isaiah [Bradley, played by Carl Lumbly] running out of the White House and into the streets.”

Of course, filming in the actual White House is completely restricted for obvious reasons, but the crew did catch a major break from the Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios, which houses a detailed replica of the iconic presidential residence. “We were able to adapt that space to most of our White House uses,” Avery says, revealing that he wanted Ross’s bold new administration to recall the optimistic era of John F. Kennedy.

“In our story, Ross is really trying to make a change. He’s got a bad history in a lot of ways and he really wants to be a different person. Not not just to be perceived as a different person, but to be a different person. So we wanted to look to White Houses that expressed that sense of change and optimism — a sense of moving forward. Going back and looking through various presidencies, the White House of the Kennedys seemed to be the best example of that … If we could look for those particular details in the wallpaper and drapes, anything that might evoke a little bit of that Camelot feel, we thought that was the right way to take Ross’s character.”

While he’s hesitant to give up too many Easter eggs hidden within the sets, understandably wanting fans to find them on their own, Avery does let slip that the scene in which Ross asks Sam to reform the Avengers does contain some seriously subtle foreshadowing…in the wallpaper.

“We start the movie seeing Ross and Sam together in the East Room, which, historically, has had various versions of wallpaper in it,” he says. “Looking back to Jackie’s version of it, there was a wallpaper that had all these interconnecting lines and forms and knots. We thought that was a really interesting way to tell the story of how Sam and Ross are going to get wound up in this web together.”

The East Room in ‘Captain America: Brave New World’

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

Lessons from the MCU

Avery is no stranger to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, as well as the immersive Avengers Campus at Disneyland in Anaheim and the similarly-themed park in Dubai.

“One of the interesting things about the MCU, is that there’s no bible,” he explains. “They don’t give you a book that says ‘This is what the MCU looks like,’ because each movie is telling its own story. There’s a general feel for what Marvel looks like, there’s some colors that you see a lot of the time, and there’s definitely a sense of tech that you see a lot of the time. But in this particular movie, they didn’t want to do that. They actually wanted to not do that.

Paranoia and the colors of control

In the case of Brave New World, director Julius Onah (Luce, The Cloverfield Paradox) wanted to channel the “grounded” paranoia thrillers of the late 1960s and early ’70s — much in the same way Captain America: The Winter Soldier drew from Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and Marathon Man a little over a decade ago.

“It’s about Sam [Wilson] finding his place in America as Captain America in this time, in this place,” Avery notes. “How [Julius] wanted to frame that, was the complexity of the world that Sam was moving through. So he was looking to using the ideas of ‘70s political thrillers as the visual framework of the storytelling to give that web of intrigue and the complexity of moving through and making decisions about your life.”

To that end, they looked at classic thrillers like Le Samouraï and The Day of the Jackal, as well as more contemporary pieces like The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Trance — all of which contain “themes of control,” Avery says. Indeed, the entire movie centers around a constant struggle between control and a lack thereof, with President Ross serving as a prime example. He starts off as a trusted public official with a noble plan to unite both the American people and international community in the wake of the Snap and the Adamantium-rich Celestial jutting out of the Indian Ocean. All of those political aspirations ultimately come crashing down around his ears in the final act when he succumbs to his anger. That rising level of danger throughout the film (appropriately reminisdcent of the government’s DEFCON levels) was represented by a range of different colors.

“We chose a color palette that represented a spectrum of control versus loss of control,” Avery reveals. “Blue represented control while red represented loss of control. And as you move through the spectrum from blue to green to yellow to orange to red, you’re [going] along various stages of that loss of control. So we would evaluate each scene as to where in the storytelling that kind of sense of control was or wasn’t, and then apply the color to that. When we would work with a scene where the character thought there was a certain amount of control, we put blue into the Oval Office, where sometimes the Oval Office is all just yellows and golds.”

The Oval Office in ‘Captain America: Brave New World’

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

Another notable instance of Brave New World’s thematic tug-of-war can be seen in the extended action sequence where Sam and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez taking on the post of Falcon) work to stop an international incident between the United States and Japan, while Ross watches helplessly from aboard the USS Milius. Once again, Avery caught a break with Navy-approved footage of the real-world battleship’s interior.

“It’s really hard to get research on military stuff for obvious reasons,” he emphasizes. “So it was super exciting to find that pre-cleared information. But the challenges for all that, is we still have to make it cinematic. It can’t just be real, it has to look like it fits in the world of our movie. That all comes down to to choosing the right colors which fit within our color scheme. We haven’t lost entire control, so we’re not to red, but we are to orange. We’ve got the idea that charcoal in our world is trying to convey stability, so we’re playing the orange against the charcoals.”

Follow the Leader

As alluded to above, the main antagonist of the movie is Samuel Sterns — aka The Leader — who was last seen in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk (the second MCU movie ever produced). Where has he been all this time?

Well, according to the latest Captain America, Sterns has been held underground as Ross’s captive at a top-secret military base designated Echo-1. While Sterns was promised that he’d be freed if he used his advanced intellect (a byproduct of Hulk blood) to cure Ross’s fatal heart ailment and make him president, Ross ends up reneging on the deal. As a result, The Leader cooks up a plan to humiliate the new POTUS through mind-controlled pawns like Isaiah Bradley.

Sam and Joaquin eventually infiltrate Echo-1 and discover Sterns’ sinister laboratory, which started off with a design inspired by bombastic comic book tradition. “It was sci-fi-ish and it was Marvel-y and it was epic,” Avery recalls.

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

“As we looked at that, [we said], ‘That’s not really the story we’re trying to tell,’” he adds. “We wanted it to feel more believable and more real. And it is underground, you’re not going to dig this giant hole underground to make a prison; you’re going to have small, contained spaces. There was a sub-point going on [thematically] in all of the design about how our characters were in boxes and as they became more aware and more in control of themselves, they got out of the boxes. The prison was the perfect place to convey that [part of the] story. The Leader’s in a box, it’s also where Isaiah was kept. So we eventually went from this big, grand, sweeping design of the space to a much more condensed, controllable, rectilinear space.”

Similar to the White House wallpaper, Sterns’ lab contains slight indicators of how he developed a way to brainwash people through strategically coordinated flashes of light. It plays into the unspoken backstory decided on for the base, which, per Avery, was built in the 1950s (the very decade in which the CIA launched its highly controversial mind control program, MKUltra). “It’s all very quick, but that’s the type of thinking you want to put into these designs,” he concludes. “The audience won’t understand every little bit about that, certainly not on the first viewing, but it creates that grounded-ness, background, and history that gives depth and reality to a design — and gives the characters the place in the story to learn and develop.”

Captain America: Brave New World is now playing in theaters.

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