A new look at the Serpent Society in Captain America: Brave New World has slithered online. The Marvel Studios movie pit Sam Wilson’s Captain America (Anthony Mackie) against the Red Hulk (Harrison Ford), the Leader (Tim Blake Nelson), and Copperhead (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) and Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) of SERPENT, a mercenary group hired by Samuel Sterns to steal Japan’s adamantium and scuttle U.S. President Thaddeus Ross’ treaty with the country.
But SERPENT, based on the snake-themed supervillain squad the Serpent Society from the comics, originally was meant to have a larger role before undergoing reshoots. WWE Superstar Seth Rollins and Alita: Battle Angel‘s Rosa Salazar had been cast as members of the Serpent Society — mercenaries infused with technology — who would have fought the star-spangled Avenger early on in the film, as seen in new keyframe art (below) shared by concept artist Michael “Blackbear” Uwandi.
“In early development, we envisioned what it would look like to see Cap fighting the Serpent Society,” Uwandi wrote on Instagram. “So many cool ideas for them that didn’t make it into the final film.”
The concept art shows Mackie’s Captain America and Danny Ramirez’s Falcon fighting the likes of Asp, Cobra, Constrictor, Diamondback, and Rattler, their tattoo-covered skin concealing the SERPENTS’ lethal cybernetic enhancements.
“The Serpent Society are classic Cap villains that have been around for decades,” Marvel Studios producer Nate Moore says in Captain America: Brave New World – The Art of the Movie. “They have a colorful past. And as we do with anything, we try to adapt them in a way that feels grounded in the MCU but still pays homage to where they came from.”
Unlike their costumed counterparts who wore colorful, snake-inspired costumes in the comics, the SERPENT mercenaries were designed to fit in with Brave New World‘s spy-thriller vibes. “We tried to come up with ideas of how the technology that manifests on the outside of the Serpents could actually be integrated into their bodies,” visual development illustrator Keith Christensen explains in the book. “I thought maybe it could be somehow evocative of snakeskin. So we have layers of skin with that milky translucency [from] when a snake is shedding its skin.”
“I was trying to come up with things that would be a little less blatant than just ‘snake man,’” Christensen continues, adding that director Julius Ohna encouraged the artists to “look at different cultures and how they had imagined or envisaged serpent people, which I explored a lot in their masks. We did all kinds of really bizarre serpent masks based on different cultural takes, and I drew a lot of inspiration from Indonesian examples.”
That included a mask for the head of the snake: Esposito’s Sidewinder, who ultimately forgoes a more snake-like appearance in favor of a trench coat as a military-style merc.
Captain America: Brave New World is now streaming on Disney+.
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