Anthony and Joe Russo have tried to clarify why next year’s Avengers 4 isn’t Infinity War Part 2 despite every indication to the contrary.
When Marvel Studios announced way back in 2015 that the third Avengers movie would actually be two films and that they would be subtitled Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2, it’s safe to say fandom let out a collective squeal of delight.
Anyone who was familiar with the Infinity Gauntlet storyline knew that’s where things were heading from the moment Thanos showed his purple face at the end of Avengers. To see the Infinity Gauntlet/War story told over two movies would be enough to give geeks everywhere fits of excitement.
That excitement didn’t dampen much when back in 2016 Anthony and Joe Russo, fresh off Captain America: Civil War, revealed that while the third and fourth Avengers movies would have elements in common, they wouldn’t necessarily be two parts of a single story. It was then that the two sequels were retitled, with Avengers 3 still going with Infinity War and the title of Avengers 4 kept top secret until the third Avengers movie was released.
Despite the change in story, the two movies were still filmed back-to-back with a budget that is being reported could be as high as $1 billion.
Despite every sign from Marvel and the Russo brothers, many fans are still wondering if the war for the Infinity Stones will spill over into two movies and how exactly that will work. Both Ant-Man and the Wasp as well as Captain Marvel, which are scheduled to hit theaters in the year between Avengers 3 and 4, have been established to take place before the events of Infinity War, so they aren’t really a factor.
Screen Rant spoke to the filmmakers about the situation and Joe Russo tried to explain that while the two movies were made almost simultaneously, they are two very different films with common threads.
“Our approach has always been … we look at the process, as with Marcus and McFeely, it’s simply the same thing in the way that The Winter Soldier relates to Civil War, and the way that Civil War relates to Infinity War. These two movies will also relate. There’s a narrative thread that is connecting these films, but at the same time, there’s an independence in terms of what the experience is or where the story goes. It isn’t a true two-parter, and I think the two-parter concept came back when Marvel decided they were going to culminate the MCU, it was going to be a two-movie deal. But as we developed the movie, in execution, it ended up being more of two singular expressions. And I think that just what happened -“
The fact that the pair of Avengers sequels are meant to bring the curtain down on the Thanos saga that has made up the last 10 years of Marvel films, it’s no shocker that it will take two movies to wrap things up. Each film has built on the last, a concept that, while not new in filmmaking, has never been attempted with this kind of scale in mind.
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Given just how much is going on in the comic book version of the Infinity Gauntlet and all that happened in the follow-up stories, there is more than enough for two separate movies with different plot lines, if not more.
Because while Avengers: Infinity War may be the beginning of the end for this particular story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are plenty more to be told.
Avengers: Infinity War opens everywhere on April 27 while Avengers 4 arrives May 3, 2019.
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