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Avengers: Infinity War Directors Explain Why Getting Thanos Right Was So Crucial

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have revealed why getting Thanos right was so crucial to the success of Avengers: Infinity War.

25 heroes, six Infinity Stones, one Mad Titan.

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That is, in a nutshell, the general outline of Avengers: Infinity War, Joe and Anthony Russo’s crowded superhero epic that has since gone on to collect more than $2 billion (!) at the worldwide box office.

Such an eye-watering tally makes Infinity War the most successful MCU movie to date – by quite some distance, we might add – and while the film is by no means perfect, it’s a pretty competent finale to what has been 10 years’ worth of superhero spectacle. And it’s not over yet, either, what with Avengers 4 expected to tend to unfinished business next year.

Exactly what the 2019 sequel will entail is a total mystery at this point; all we know for sure is that the remaining members of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will mount some sort of counter-attack against Thanos, the purple-skinned tyrant responsible for The Snappening.

He was the beating heart of Marvel’s Infinity War, too, and during the director’s commentary found on the film’s home video release, Joe Russo stressed the importance of getting Thanos right.

It’s told from the point of view of Thanos. The movie begins with Thanos, the movie ends with Thanos. It is his hero’s journey. All the major beats of the journey are Thanos beats. We knew that we were sunk if we couldn’t get Thanos to be photo-real and get all of the nuances of Josh Brolin into that character. They literally are playing with technology, mapping him to the molecular level, which is why I think Thanos is so interesting in the movie. All of the subtleties of Josh’s performance are being outlined…We might have spent two years working on Thanos.

The Russo Brothers also faced the somewhat difficult task of adding layers to a character who had spent the past six years wasting away on the sidelines – hell, The Avengers director Joss Whedon has since admitted that he didn’t quite know what to do with Thanos.

It’s a feat they achieved in tandem with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, as the latter revealed during the aforementioned commentary:

People are working on how to create Thanos before we even had an outline of the movie because we know that he’s gonna play a major part in the movie.

Currently available to pick up on digital platforms, look for Avengers: Infinity War to light up Blu-ray and DVD on August 14th.