Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame are two of the most ambitious and successful blockbusters ever made that somehow managed to wrap up over a decade’s worth of storytelling from across the Marvel Cinematic Universe into a satisfying conclusion, and also combined to both draw a line under the Infinity Saga and earn almost $5 billion at the box office.
Unsurprisingly given the epic scope and scale of the movies, co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely faced huge challenges in cracking the story for both Infinity War and Endgame, and McFeely admitted that fear began to set in when the duo’s first draft of Infinity War wasn’t received with much enthusiasm by Marvel Studios.
“There’s a lot of trial and error in these. We got this job before we started shooting Civil War, and all of the things you’ve seen on screen were sort of created in some nascent way in the last four months of 2015. So we’ve been living with this for a long time. But it goes through all these ebbs and flows, and there was a point in mid-to-late 2016 where no one liked what we all had. And so we flew back to Burbank from Atlanta in sort of a panic, all hands on deck, ‘oh my God, we’re in trouble’. And the biggest thing that came out of that was the Thor storyline sucked rocks. It was dark because it felt like we’d been on it a long time and hadn’t done enough, or done well enough.”
Markus added that the studio knows what they’re doing when it comes to creating their movies, and praised them for giving the script time to change and develop instead of launching into full-fledged panic mode.
“There are many companies in Los Angeles that freak out. Slap a first draft in front of them and they freak out, because it’s a first draft. Because everybody wants a third draft for a first draft. Marvel knows damn well what a first draft is, and then they work on it. And that means you never leave the conference room, but it makes good movies.”
Given the massive success of Avengers: Infinity War, it sounds strange to hear the people that wrote it admit the struggles that they faced in getting the story to the big screen, but praise must go to both Markus and McFeely for penning a fitting two-part conclusion to twenty-one movies’ worth of storytelling, and also to Marvel Studios for refusing to hit the panic button based only on a first draft.
