Why We Didn’t Visit Xandar During Avengers: Infinity War

Collider’s exhaustive post-mortem on Avengers: Infinity War continues today with a reference to Xandar and, specifically, why the far-flung planet was left out of the Marvel tentpole entirely.

For the uninitiated, Xandar is home to the Nova Corps and featured quite prominently in James Gunn’s first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which reached its conclusion just as Star-Lord and his fellow A-Holes left the Power Stone on Xandar – much to the dismay of Yondu and his Ravagers.

And so, by the time Infinity War begins, Thanos is already in possession of the Power Stone, meaning the Mad Titan and his nefarious Black Order raided the Xandar vaults off-screen. It’s somewhat surprising that the Xandarians, a peaceful, human-like race, didn’t feature in Avengers: Infinity War, though as Stephen McFeely tells Collider, doing so would have risked evoking a sense of repetition as Thanos goes about collecting all six Infinity Stones.

We certainly did drafts where we went to Xandar and got the [Power Stone]. Again, the problem of six MacGuffins is, you know…the challenge was always how to not have the same scene six times.

His writing partner Christopher Markus echoed that sentiment, too, and stressed that the subsequent brawl between Thanos and the Nova Corps only would’ve impacted the film’s pacing.

Markus: Also, if you were going to do it, it would have to be kind of gigantic because it [would have been] Thanos versus the Nova Corps, and it wasn’t giving you enough on a character level to justify the amount of space it was going to take.

McFeely: That’s right. It was pretty early on in the script phase [when we decided] that if were going to put one [Infinity Stone] off-screen, then that’s the one.

Other questions and Infinity War-related queries covered by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely include the whereabouts of Hawkeye, an extended scene between Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, and how early drafts of the Marvel threequel included Sharon Carter. Suffice it to say, the writers have been spilling a lot, and as soon as more surfaces, we’ll be sure to let you know.