While it may sound like an insult to say that Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t even a movie, The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman seems to mean it in the nicest way possible.
Speaking on the latest SModcast with Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, the writer and producer observed how the recent Marvel mega-hit skips out on the usual exposition you’d expect from such superhero outings and throws you straight into the action.
“I love that Infinity War was not even a movie,” Kirkman said. “They were just like here’s a series of events that are important to you because you know these characters. It’s going to go from A to B to C to D because it’s not a three-act structure, it’s like ‘whatever man, you’re paying for an experience’. There’s no recap. There’s no explanation as to who anyone is. You sit down in the movie and they’re just like ‘guess what? You’ve earned this. We’re at like movie 21 now and here we f****** go’ and you’re like ‘oh my god! Like this is so great!’
As the culmination of a decade’s worth of climatic universe-building, Infinity War is a movie that requires a fair amount of homework to fully understand, meaning that any viewer who hasn’t been keeping track of the MCU’s feature-length offerings up to this point is probably left feeling a little lost. Still, given the film’s ridiculously huge box office returns, it’s clear that plenty of fans were willing to come along for the ride.
Indeed, even Kirkman himself made the trip to the cinema multiple times, despite not being a fan of the pic’s genocidal ending on first viewing.
“At the end of that movie, I got my arms crossed and I’m going ‘Oh yeah, Black Panther’s dead. You f****** kidding me? Oh really? You’re in a production for a second Spider-Man movie right now so I’m supposed to now be upset that Tom Holland is dying in this really emotional way?’ And then the movie’s just over and it’s like ‘oh f*** you! I’m not buying this, they’re all coming back in the next movie. It’s like I’ve read the comic. I know that they disappear and come back…like ah f***. Whatever. Bah!’ I can’t believe he ended it this way.”
But while this conclusion didn’t initially sit well with Kirkman, he had a change of heart once he saw the effect that the climax had on his daughter.
“But then, I see every Marvel movie two or three times in the theater cuz I have free time, and my daughter didn’t go with me to the first time because she had something going on, and so I bring my nine-year-old daughter a second time and she’s sitting next to me,” Kirkman said. “And when those people start to disappear, I look over at her and she is not crying, but it looks like she could cry. Her mouth is agape. Her eyes are open. She has her little tiny nine-year-old girl hands like clutching her heart and she looks at the screen going (breaths), like taking these breaths. And the emotion that I saw in her…I almost wept in the theater. I was like ‘oh my God. This is like a movie.”
From this experience, Kirkman took the lesson that sometimes the most considerate thing you can do is let the kids experience the excitement of seeing their heroes disintegrate before their eyes.
“Seeing how it affected her I was like ‘just try to not be so god**** cynical Robert.’ Like, let people enjoy a thing, ya know? And that’s something I think, every comic book fan on the internet should f****** realize, like quit being smarter than everyone else, quit being mean to people, like calm down. Let people enjoy a thing sometimes.”
Though Avengers: Infinity War didn’t do a whole lot to ease in newcomers, you can imagine Avengers 4 will prove even more fan-oriented when it hits theaters and concludes this action-packed two-parter on May 3rd, 2019.
