Thanos Almost Narrated The Story Of Avengers: Infinity War

In an interview with Collider, directors Joe and Anthony Russo revealed that Avengers: Infinity War almost featured narration from the film’s villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin. Here are highlights:

On Thanos almost narrating the story: “We did three drafts of this that were all radically different. One draft involved Thanos as the narrator of the film. It was non-linear in structure, it had backstories for the Black Order, and they were all introduced in very cool sequences. But it ended up being a 250-page script and we thought, ‘Alright, we can’t fit all of this storytelling.’”

On how that draft informed the current version: “A lot of times when you work on a movie of this scale and you end up with a 250-page draft, it’s the bible for the movie. You gain a lot of information. You write characters out in a way that you start to understand what it is they want. I think writing out Thanos’ narration gave us insight into who he was as a character and what we wanted him to do in this film. So then it was much easier once we started pulling all that out to make it subtext for him as a character, and to make a more linear structure.”

On deciding on a linear approach: “We did a lot of development on this, but at a certain point we thought, ‘This is really a heist movie, and Thanos is enacting a heist. It’s gotta have a certain structure to it that reflects a heist film.’ So if you look at the movie, its actually is sort of like Two Days in the Valley or Out of Sight where there’s multiple McGuffins that Thanos is chasing and that all the other characters are trying to get to first, or stop him from getting. So it’s a very simple structure. We thought, we have so many characters in the movie, we have to simplify the structure. I think that’s really what led us from that 250-page draft to what the movie is now is simplifying the plot, keeping it linear, and letting the character moments come through.”