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Avengers: Infinity War Director Says Benedict Cumberbatch Only Thinks He’s Read the Full Script

Despite claiming to have read the entire script, Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo says Benedict Cumberbatch only thinks he read the full thing.

The events of Avengers: Infinity War are set to change the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe forever. The status quo will permanently shift and Kevin Feige is insistent that some big heroes are going to fall during the movie. As such, the events of the film – and particularly the shooting script – have been kept under incredibly tight security. So tight, in fact, that none of the film’s A-list cast have even read the whole thing.

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Benedict Cumberbatch, however, who plays Doctor Strange, claims he’s the exception. In a recent interview, he said he was one of the few people permitted to see the full, unexpurgated shooting script. Obviously, some were skeptical of this and co-director Joe Russo and producer Trinh Tran were asked by Channel NewsAsia whether that was indeed the case and quickly dismissed his claims.

“He thinks he read the whole script. We wrote fake scenes, fake drafts of the script and delivered them to the actors,” said Russo.

Tran explained that they sent different versions to different people so nobody except the directors and producers knew what was going to happen. After all, a widely distributed script means there’s way more chance for something to leak from it – precisely what ravenous entertainment sharks like me hunger for. In addition, each actor being given a different script lets the producers know exactly who’s leaking the stuff – and they can politely tell them to keep their big mouth shut in the future if they want a continued slice of the lucrative MCU pie.

Having said all that, I’d love to see what the ‘fake’ scenes included in the script were. It’d be neat to see what kinds of crazy stuff they’d think of that believably could happen in the film but didn’t. Maybe it’d be an interesting special feature on the Blu-ray?

In the meantime, I’m far more interested in what actually happens in Avengers: Infinity War. And fortunately, I’ll find out in just under a week, when it opens big on April 27th.