We’d been told to expect darkness and death, but I don’t think any of us were ready for that truly devastating ending to Avengers: Infinity War. After spending the movie bringing together all six Infinity Stones, Thanos finally completed the set and achieved his life’s goal of wiping out half of all life in the universe, with just a snap of his fingers. And amongst his victims were some of Marvel’s biggest names, including Black Panther, Spider-Man, Star-Lord and Doctor Strange.
It was a ballsy move to say the least, proving once and for all that the MCU isn’t just about the laughs and can only maintain a light-hearted tone. But how did the decision to end Infinity War this way come about? Obviously, as comic book readers know, Thanos does exactly the same thing in The Infinity Gauntlet storyline, but it wasn’t a given that this would be adapted to the screen.
It was apparently Marvel chief Kevin Feige who encouraged the writers to embrace it, though. “Don’t be afraid of that move,” he told them. “It’s okay to go there, and let’s go there.” This is what scribes Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus revealed while in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that once they knew that the finger snap moment had to happen, they set about building up to it, as opposed to using it as the inciting incident – as it is on the page.
“The question was, How do you get there? How do you bring the most story and emotion and pathos? And was it going to be where it was? Do you do it at the end of the movie? Do you do it at some other spot?”
The most important thing about making this the final scene of the film is that the writers wanted Infinity War to have closure and for the pause between this one and next year’s Avengers 4 to feel purposeful and not simply like the end of part one. Markus went on to say that they wanted to leave some “questions,” but to still answer the big one – what would Thanos do? – with a “definitive yes.”
“There are still questions. What are they (The Avengers) going to do, and all those sorts of things. But if you had stopped it before he snapped his fingers, or with four stones, that really is just a pause button. That really is just going, What’s he going to do? Will your hero stop dangling from the cliff? And we wanted to put a much more definitive Yes, this happens. Deal with it, tone at the end of it, rather than jerk you around.”
Avengers: Infinity War certainly achieves that aim of finishing things off on a very definitive note. Even if we do have theories and questions about how things might be resolved next time, the Avengers are absolutely in the worst possible situation going into the sequel. For the first time ever, they’ve well and truly lost.
