The back-to-back productions of Infinity War and Avengers 4 – two of the most ambitious and indeed audacious comic book movies ever made – really is the stuff of legend, so it’s a credit to the Russo Brothers and their crew that both films are bang on schedule.
Of course, the first is a little known Marvel sequel called Infinity War, which is poised to get the ball rolling on April 27th, before Joe and Anthony Russo’s untitled Avengers 4 tends to unfinished business the following year – and when it does, the MCU will be a markedly different place.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, though, GamesRadar caught up with the Russos to discuss their two Avengers sequels and, perhaps more importantly, which was more difficult to make.
Said Joe Russo:
Good question. I think [Infinity War] only because it was a compressed time frame and we were posting it while we were shooting Avengers 4.
That’s understandable, really, as post-production on Infinity War overlapped with the actual filming of Avengers 4, which shipped Earth’s Mightiest Heroes off to the likes of Edinburgh, Georgia and everywhere in between.
Now for the million-dollar question: will Avengers 3 and 4 still retain some sense of coherent storytelling given their huge, near-unprecedented scope? The jury’s still out on that one, but the Russo Brothers continue to stress that both films are very, very different from one another.
It’s a complete story. It’s got a beginning, middle and an end and the next movie has a beginning, middle and an end, in the same way that Civil War handed off to Infinity War and Infinity War will hand off to the next movie. It’s serialized storytelling without question so there is going to be a correlation, narratively, but we really wanted to make two distinct movies. We weren’t interested in making one long film and getting out the scissors and cutting the scissors and cutting it in half. We don’t find that a satisfying cinematic experience so this is a complete story, that’s a complete story, and they’re very different movies.
Look for Infinity War to kick things off on April 27th, before the fourth and as-yet-untitled Avengers movie touches down on May 3rd, 2019.