On Wednesday, Marvel released the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, which looks to bring together just about every Marvel hero we’ve seen since Iron Man was released in 2008. The trailer also gave us a glimpse of Thanos in action, complete with a funny little gag at the end. It was exciting, and Thanos the Mad Titan is powerful enough, throwing the Avengers around like toys. But more than anything else, it also felt like the end of an era, which is exactly how Marvel wants us to view Avengers: Infinity War.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Kevin Feige, the man who led the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, talks about the early days of the idea behind Avengers: Infinity War and how it all came together. With contracts running out, characters are going to die and there’s going to be a real changing of the guard.
We’ve argued in the past that the movies were too scared to change the status quo, but Feige said Infinity War comes at the end of a 22-movie arc. With the success of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, and the anticipation that has built up around the next Black Panther, it’s safe to say that Marvel has been able to build a pantheon of new heroes who can take over the reins from Iron Man, Thor and Captain America.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Marvel will stop making movies with these characters – it might reboot them, or maybe take a leaf from the pages of the comics and bring in new incarnations of the characters.
But what’s truly amazing to think, before Infinity War comes out, is that we might finally get a payout for ten years worth of movies. The thing is, Marvel has been able to make some very successful movies, which do a great job in terms of tone, but the interconnected nature of the MCU is its biggest strength, but also kind of a weakness because you can’t allow a story to follow its course. If a character is needed for a scene three movies later, you have to make sure the pieces are all in position to allow that to happen, or make awkward references to breakups in the middle of your movie.
With Avengers: Infinity War, we finally get to bring the current arc to a close, which means allowing the story to develop more organically. It’s a chance to clean the board, and it means we can actually live up to the hype that was created when – at the end or Iron Man – Nick Fury burst onto the screen for a short cameo for talk about the Avengers initiative.
It’s been a long time coming, but at this point Marvel has finally reached a place where everything is on the board. Characters were introduced and established, while off-screen negotiations with other studios brought back Spider-Man, Marvel’s biggest A-lister.
Now, like a child playing with their toys, we can watch Marvel smash the whole thing and knock some pieces off the board. Compared to anything we’ve seen before, Infinity War operates on a completely different scale. Either we’re going to watch a complete disaster of a movie where each character gets a minute of screen time, or we’re going to see them take inspiration from the comics and cartoons, and put the teams together effectively.
This was one of the shortcomings of the previous films – Ultron and Civil War felt bad because they tried to focus on too many individuals, rather than taking over the team. The trailer we’ve seen now promises to at least bring everyone together and keep that as our goal, so it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.
But ahead of the May 2018 release date, we’re extremely excited and can’t wait to see everyone on screen for once. Whether it’s a well-made movie or not, Marvel is going to make a lot of money on this one, but hopefully it does justice to the 10 years we’ve all been waiting for the payoff.
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