Originally published July 25, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
Following its preview at the Marvel Studios panel at the San Diego Comic-Con this past Saturday, Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo hit the press rounds to discuss Marvel’s hugely-anticipated superhero blockbuster.
Speaking to Collider, Russo spoke about the film’s running time, stating that it’s likely to end up in the “two and a half hour-plus range”, perhaps unsurprisingly making it one of the longest Marvel movies.
“The current cut is over two and a half [hours],” said Russo. “Most of it’s a movie you could show, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done, I still have a couple of scenes that we haven’t finished from Avengers 3 that I’m shooting in the next few months with my brother, and it’s certainly gonna be a film that lives in the two and a half hour, two and a half hour-plus range. It’s a culmination event. We’ve gotta take 10 years of storytelling in this Marvel narrative experiment that’s been going on since Iron Man, and we have to take all these disparate tones, disparate themes, motivations, and we have to pull them together in a unified narrative and write the final chapters of the book. There’s no way you could do that with all these characters in under that running length.”
Meanwhile, speaking to Coming Soon, Russo discussed the inclusion of the Black Order – a.k.a. the Children of Thanos – in the characters of Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight, Black Dwarf, and Ebony Maw:
“We get inspired by a lot of different material when we’re working on the movie,” said Russo. “We pulled from both Infinity runs for this, and look, there are a scary bunch of characters who I happen to think, when I read the Infinity run, were super cool. And when I got the opportunity to make this movie, I said I have to do the Black Order. You know, we have so many characters and Thanos needs to be teased out. You can’t have the characters challenging him every step of the way. There has to be characters that they have to go through to get to him. The Black Order is the perfect cast of characters to do that with.”
Asked about the omission of the comic books’ fifth member Supergiant, Russo added: “We are dealing with so many characters that we made some choices along the way. Consolidation seemed like a smart thing to my brother and I because they were starting to overlap each other. And frankly, when you see the movie you’ll understand, it services the storytelling.”
As the Avengers and their allies have continued to protect the world from threats too large for any one hero to handle, a new danger has emerged from the cosmic shadows: Thanos. A despot of intergalactic infamy, his goal is to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of unimaginable power, and use them to inflict his twisted will on all of reality. Everything the Avengers have fought for has led up to this moment – the fate of Earth and existence itself has never been more uncertain.
Avengers: Infinity War opens on April 27th 2018 in the UK and May 4th 2018 in the US and will feature an all-star cast including Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Chris Evans (Captain America), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye), Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Sebastian Stan (Winter Soldier), Anthony Mackie (Falcon), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Paul Bettany (Vision), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), Don Cheadle (War Machine), Josh Brolin (Thanos), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Benedict Wong (Wong), Chris Pratt (Star-Lord), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Dave Bautista (Drax), Bradley Cooper (Rocket), Sean Gunn (Rocket, Kraglin), Vin Diesel (Groot), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Pom Klementieff (Mantis), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill), Benicio Del Toro (The Collector), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Winston Duke (M’Baku) and Peter Dinklage and Terry Notary in as-yet-unrevealed roles.
