5 Factors That Make Me Utterly Worried About Avengers: Infinity War

Since 2008’s Iron Man, Marvel has gradually created a connected universe and built a story-line that will reach its culmination with the arrival of Thanos. With every new Marvel movie release, we are getting one step closer to the epic showdown that is Avengers: Infinity War. In the comics, Thanos’ goal is to impress Mistress Death, for which he collects the six Infinity Stones that come with an immeasurable amount of power. Recent rumors suggest that his motives are the same in the MCU, but nothing can be said for sure.

Being a huge fan myself, I’m extremely excited for the Mad Titan to face-off against Earth’s mightiest heroes, but at the same time I’m awfully concerned about it as well due to the following reasons.

5. The Hype

Thanos in ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ (2014)

Marvel Studios has been setting up the arrival of Thanos in the MCU since The Avengers. It’s been four years since then and we still have one left before he finally makes it to the big screen. This has left fans with an ever-increasing hype as everyone is hastily awaiting the Avengers to confront him. All this build-up may result into the audience thinking that Infinity War wasn’t as good as they thought it would be. I’m not saying that it will lack quality, but with all that fanfare, it’s reasonable to say that most people have the highest expectations when it comes to the movie. This makes it a tremendous challenge for the studio and the Russo brothers to live up to the anticipation and that worries me a bit.

There exist many a lot movies that failed despite being pretty good, because they couldn’t live up to the hype. Some of these are superhero movies such as Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Superman Returns and X-Men: The Last Stand. This partially has to do with the fact that the original movies were so admirable, that fans expected the same if not more from their sequels. Marvel Studios has done a splendid job so far, but to tackle the gargantuan Avengers: Infinity War is something else entirely.

4. The Cast

Avengers: Infinity War will include quite a few familiar faces with an estimate that 67 characters will be showing up. The cast will include the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and newbies Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.

“We do consider everyone. We don’t want to get too specific about what’s going to happen with these movies. We want these movies to be a surprise for audiences.” – Anthony Russo

With one movie being this much crowded, it’s extremely difficult to give each character a reasonable screen-time whilst making the plot progress effectively.

“What we did in Civil War is exactly what we want to do in the Avengers — no matter how much screen time a character has, you can still have a lot of ambition for what you do with that character while you have them.” – Anthony Russo

I have to admit that the Russos made all the diverse characters share the screen-time amazingly well in Captain America: Civil War. Each role was included in such a way that it would give its best while being on-screen. But again the practically much bigger cast for Infinity War will be extremely hard to fit in, now that it is not a two-parter but one independent movie.

3. The Plot

I really hope Thanos doesn’t have a huge army in Infinity War. If he does have an army (possibly the Chitauri), then it will be Avengers 1 all over again. Almost every superhero movie follows this typical plot- our heroes have to fight an army of innumerable goons until finally they face-off against the main antagonist. This plot has been repeated several times by movies such as The Avengers 1 and 2, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Thor: The Dark World and Suicide Squad. Adding a swarm of henchmen will make Infinity War just another movie with heroes bashing random heads together, and will somewhat eliminate the idea of Thanos being All-Powerful.

Instead of this, an interesting premise that Marvel adapted was that Thanos assembles his own super-villain team- ‘The Black Order’. In the comics, The Black Order is a group of lethal aliens gathered by Thanos in order to help him destroy entire worlds. Creating such a team of super-villains will hopefully give Infinity War a completely new path to follow.

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2. The Diversity

The thing about all MCU heroes getting together that bugs me a lot is the diverse nature of their abilities. On one side we have the mighty Thor and the beastly Hulk, whereas on the other hand we’ve got normal S.H.I.E.L.D. agents like Hawkeye and Black Widow. What purpose all these individual characters will have in Infinity War is beyond me. I certainly don’t want to see them, or even Captain America, Black Panther or the Winter Soldier for that matter directly facing Thanos for a brawl. It’s just not plausible and it makes me wonder what their respective roles will be in the movie. Although, there’s the option of them fighting Thanos’ henchmen, but that is a bit too convenient as well.

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1. The Mad Titan

For us to truly feel that the ‘Avatar of Death’ is a significant threat to the world and its heroes, he has to be intimidating AF. Sure, he may seem quite overawing for now, but honestly we haven’t seen his true powers to make a sensible judgement. Only Infinity War will reveal how much of an oppressor he is. In my book, this is the foremost necessity for Infinity War to work and without it, the whole point of the clash will become meaningless. Let’s take X-Men: Apocalypse for example. Fox Studios tried a lot to make Apocalypse look intimidating, which he seemed to be at first. But somewhere in the middle that intimidation started to wear off. He looked short in front of his horsemen, and relied on Magneto to do most of his work. They may not seem much, but these tiny details are the essence of character building. And after all, when all hope was lost, he was easily defeated by a teenager. Majority of the MCU villains are also not intimidating, which makes us lose the fervor of the battle. Thus, it is of the utmost importance that Thanos earns the title of the ‘Mad Titan’ in Infinity War. Hopefully, the Russo brothers understand that and will do justice to the character:

“He (Thanos) is a blank slate, but he is a mythic figure. His stature is, both literally and figuratively, enormous. What’s important to us is digging in and dimensionalizing him and make you understand why he does what he does.” – Joe Russo

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No matter how they do it, Captain America 2 and 3 are evidence that the Russo brothers will do justice with Avengers: Infinity War, and as fans, we can just hope for the best. Avengers: Infinity War releases April 25, 2018.