Avengers: Infinity War Will Be The “Final Test” For Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

Avengers: Infinity War, and its untitled sequel, will act as the “culmination” of everything that’s happened over the first ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with 2008’s Iron Man. That’s a sentence we’ve heard a lot in the run-up to the event movie of the year, but what does it actually mean? Does it simply indicate that all of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will be wiped out in one fell swoop, like Tony’s nightmare vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron?

When they got a chance to catch up with the Russo brothers at a set visit last year, CinemaBlend pressed the directors for some clarification on what the “culmination” buzzword meant in terms of the actual story. Obviously, the Russos were too canny to give any spoilers away, but they did tease that they sought to explore “cataclysmic events” in these films. And that doesn’t refer to planet-wide destruction, but rather, the significance of the journeys the characters will go on.

“I think as storytellers, what it means for us is that while you’re always looking for cataclysmic events in a film, to change a character [or] to challenge a character, and to sort of explore who that character is and test who that character is, it gave all of us in this film an opportunity to figure out, well, what were those ultimate tests for these characters, you know what I mean? To go one step further even than how you would normally test the character in one of these films, because we had the freedom to sort of think of it in many cases as sort of a final test.”

As we reported earlier, Joe Russo then followed Anthony’s comments by confirming that Infinity War and Avengers 4 will serve as an end of an era, effectively acting as “the ending of the book.” On a similar subject, the Russo brothers were also asked on the chances of any Avengers dying in the movies. They revealed that Infinity War would increase the stakes “times ten” and would explore some “dramatic” and “mature” storytelling. Excited yet?

Avengers: Infinity War lands in cinemas on April 27th.