The Mad Titan is about to get his due. And not a moment too soon.
It’s going on six years since Thanos, Josh Brolin’s über-villain and amoral philosopher, was first introduced via The Avengers and its endgame stinger, and in that time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ballooned in size – so much so, that the superhero franchise now touts close to 30 principal heroes. And we’re merely scratching the surface.
So it almost goes without saying that Thanos is about to enjoy a pretty significant role in Avengers: Infinity War. After all, his quest to assemble all six Infinity Stones is enough to place Earth’s Mightiest Heroes on red alert, as they begin formulating a plan to cancel the apocalypse. And in the eyes of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, it’s this narrative drive that has allowed Infinity War to become Thanos’ origin story.
One of the big challenges is how to make sure he’s not just a relentless machine collecting stones like he’s going shopping. So we want to give him a full weighted emotional story. You can kind of say this is Thanos’ origin story, so that he will get the weight of any of the previous heroes in terms of the decisions he has to make in order to get what he wants.
As we learned from Infinity War‘s latest (and record-breaking!) trailer, much of Thanos’ backstory will be told through flashbacks, with one scene in particular seemingly revealing the moment he decided to take the young Gamora under his wing.
It’s for this reason that Markus believes Thanos wouldn’t consider himself a villain, per se:
Villain is a derogatory term that Thanos wouldn’t agree with. Another one of the things we set out to do in this was, if Thanos is just a bad guy, then you’re dead in the water. It’s just a bad guy, you know? You get bored pretty quickly after he’s torn off the first few heads, and we have two movies. […] Hopefully you’ll come away from this the same way you do in the comics. He started off as a rogue villain but he’s his own thing now. Where you go, ‘I can’t say he was wrong.’ [laughs]
In addition, Markus identified the ways in which Avengers: Infinity War draws from Jim Starlin when handling the somewhat complicated arc of Thanos.
Part of it is motivation, where if you have a villain who just wants to kill somebody or just wants to take over the world because it seems like a fun thing to do, or has been paid by the Russians to take over the world…run for President to take over the world … That guy isn’t very interesting. He’s pathetic but, we take this from [Jim] Starlin.
Thanos is an amoral philosopher. He’s not the Devil – although he does sometimes have the Devil standing next to him. We wanted that all the way through. To have a villain with understandable motivations and emotions. Thanos has family. Thanos has two daughters that we know of. Thanos has eight million backstories in the comics but they’re all kind of sad.
So, there you have it; the chief antagonist of Avengers: Infinity War and the current MCU is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, which only has us counting down the days until April 27th.
