Avengers: Infinity War
is a monster success for Disney, and it’s already closing in on $1 billion in revenue worldwide. The movie brings us the first part of the epic confrontation between the Avengers and Thanos, and people die. Heroes die. This isn’t a spoiler, so don’t complain about hearing that some of your favorite heroes will die in the film. It’s war. You should go into that cinema fully expecting that anybody could die.
But, being a comic book movie, you might not be sure how seriously you should take those deaths. After all, heroes who die in comic books come back to life all the time. However, the screenwriters tell us that the deaths are real, and we should deal with it. Beware, spoilers will follow below.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, the writers of Avengers: Infinity War, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, talked about their experience writing Infinity War and next year’s sequel. And they said the deaths are real. The characters might not just be resurrected as we all expect them to be.
“[Avengers 4] doesn’t do what you think it does,” Markus said. “It is a different movie than you think it is.”
“Also…[the deaths are] real. I just want to tell you it’s real, and the sooner you accept that the sooner you will be able to move on to the next stage of grief.”
“Put it this way,” McFeely added. “I think [Infinity War] is a fairly mature movie for a blockbuster. It’s got a lot of fun in it, obviously, but boy, it gets very mature. The second one is also mature. We’re going to own these choices, and hopefully surprise and delight you and get you invested. It’s by the same studio, the same filmmaking team. They were written at the same time, shot at the same time. They’re clearly connected, but they are definitely two different movies, one of which is dependent on what happened previously.”
“We broke your heart,” added Markus. “Now we’re going to blow your mind!”
As I said, going into that theater, I fully expected many people to die, and I fully expected some of them to be brought back to life, regardless of whether Thanos won the day or not — here are all the characters that died, by the way. The ending didn’t really break my heart, because I had just witnessed the death of characters supposed to appear in future episodes of their own franchises, including Spider-Man, the Guardians, and Black Panther.
The movie writers, however, say they couldn’t have written the movie to account for your knowledge of the real world. And that’s a fair point. Also, they say that they could have not foreseen how big Black Panther would be when they finished the script for Avengers 3.
That said, no matter what the cost will be, I just don’t buy it that all these characters will stay dead. What I do expect from Avengers 4 is to revive plenty of them, and kill others — this time for good.
On the other hand, what if the deaths are real? McFeely did add that some of the characters who did not get too much screen time in the first movie will be avenged in the second one.
“We had so many characters in movie 1, and we knew it was a two-movie conversation,” he said. “Some characters were better served in movie 2 after this event. We were making some choices based on some characters we knew were going to leave us at the end of the first movie, so they got highlighted in the first movie. And some who were going to be in the second movie more maybe got less attention or less screentime [in Infinity War] — I’m thinking of Cap and Natasha, specifically. It’s about the story we wanted to tell in movie 2, mostly.”
The writers also teased that what’s coming next in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel is very important for the overall Avengers story. So yes, we’ll have to pay close attention to these films when they launch — that’s July 2018 and March 2019, respectively. Then Avengers 4 arrives in May 2019.
Finally, Hawkeye is alive and well, and he’ll show up in the next movie.
“We like Hawkeye so much we gave him a really good story,” Markus said.
