Leading up to the 2018 release of Avengers: Infinity War, Kevin Feige warned of death.
Not Mistress Death or Lady Death, mind you, but the literal loss of life, which, for a movie as crowded as Infinity War, placed comic book movie fans on red alert. Overnight, nine kinds of speculative theories cropped up online, each attempting to answer the ultimate question: who lives, and who dies?
As fate would have it, 50 percent of all living creatures perished by the end of Avengers: Infinity War – decimated at the hands of Marvel’s Mad Titan, Thanos. It tees up quite the finale in this year’s Endgame, but prior to April 2018, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige began to doubt that cliffhanger ending.
I was a hundred percent confident in that ending… until about the Monday before release. Then I started to get really nervous. It was like, ‘Wait a minute: what have we done?’ For years, leading up to the release of that ending, people were going, ‘These movies are predictable. The good guy always wins.’ And for years I was thinking, ‘Just wait.’
That’s Feige there, speaking to Empire Magazine as part of the outlet’s special Avengers: Endgame preview issue. It’s packed to the rafters with all kinds of MCU trivia, but when asked about Infinity War and, more specifically, its remarkably bleak third act, Feige remembered the fan reactions – particularly those who were beginning to grow tired of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes escaping each predicament with relative ease.
Via Empire:
And that ending, which we had been working on for many years, and I do remember people, on all of the movies we’ve made and I’m sure on many of the movies we’ll make in the future, whenever the good guy wins, which is often — good guy, good woman, good hero wins — they go, ‘Eh, it’s kind of predictable. Good guy wins. Well, sometimes that’s fun. But for years I remember thinking, ‘I wonder what they’re going to do when they don’t?’ Because we knew that was coming. And it couldn’t have been better. The reaction was the best. The reaction. Was. The. Best.
All that changed with the release of Avengers: Infinity War, which effectively reduced the MCU’s total population by 50 percent. Suffice it to say, Endgame will open at a time when Marvel’s heroes are at their lowest – at their most desperate – so prepare for the comeback to end all comebacks.