“The hardest choices require the strongest wills.”
Marvel’s special SDCC poster for Avengers: Infinity War presents the definition of success, as told by the Mad Titan himself.
Drawn up by MCU veteran Ryan Meinerding, this beautiful one-sheet is lifted from the very end of Infinity War, by which point Thanos has destroyed half of all life in the universe and quietly retires to a life of solitude, as he watches the sun rise on a grateful universe.
There has been some debate over the whereabouts of Thanos in this particular scene, after one MCU theorist claimed that Josh Brolin’s purple tyrant actually used the Infinity Gauntlet to travel back to a time when Titan was still in its heyday. Whether that’s indeed the case remains to be seen, but down below, you’ll see a Marvel-inspired motivational poster, on which the Mad Titan defines success as “the hardest choices require the strongest wills.”
Is it too much of a stretch to say that Thanos is the greatest antagonist ever to grace the Marvel Cinematic Universe? With the exception of Loki, few characters come close to the Mad Titan’s character development, which was so compelling that Reddit garnered a 600,000-strong thread in support of him.
Mind you, in the name of absolute balance, that particularly subreddit has since been halved in what quickly became the biggest Reddit purge in the site’s 13-year history.
So, yeah, even after Avengers: Infinity War became a two-billion-dollar success story for the folks at Marvel Studios, the legacy of Thanos lives on. Which is just as well when you consider that Joe and Anthony Russo still have Avengers 4 in the pipeline for 2019.
