New magazine cover photos offer look at Captain America 2 The Winter Soldier

The Marvel Cinematic Universe returns to the big screen when Captain America: The Winter Soldier (aka Captain America 2) hits theaters on April 4, 2014. The film will pick up two years after the events of The Avengers as Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) continues to adjust to the 21^st century world. But his life gets much more complicated when Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), his World War II partner who seemingly fell to his death in the first Captain America movie, returns as the Winter Soldier.

Two new Empire magazine covers offer looks at Evans as Captain America, Stan as the Winter Soldier and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. Check out the photos below:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be another building block in Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it moves toward The Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. Iron Man 3 was the first film in Phase Two, as it dealt with the fallout from The Avengers and showed how the events of that movie affected Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). Similarly, Captain America 2 will show how the all-American supersoldier deals with not only the effects of The Battle of New York, but the continual struggle of missing 70 years of societal development. He also begins to question S.H.I.E.L.D. as the movie unfolds.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier stars Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Robert Redford, Hayley Atwell, Emily VanCamp, Anthony Mackie, Frank Grillo, Toby Jones, Maximiliano Hernandez and Georges St-Pierre.