TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
WHO IS ON SET FOR AN EPIC BATTLE 10 YEARS IN THE MAKING WITH EARTHS MIGHTIEST HEROES AGAINST WARLORD THANOS IN 'AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
The sky is a raging sea of iron grey storm clouds, and a faraway rumble rolls across the countryside like something gigantic colliding with the other side of Earth.
Thor and Captain America are standing on an African savanna beside a sparkling river, back-toback for the first time in ages, each reunited while wielding new weapons. Cap’s red-whiteand-blue shield is gone, replaced by a pair of vibranium gauntlets (courtesy of Black Panther’s genius little sister, Shuri), while Thor swings a mystical axe known as Stormbreaker, a supersize upgrade from his demolished hammer, Mjolnir.
The skyline of Wakanda’s capital city stands in the distance, and Cap and Thor are among hundreds of tribal warriors from throughout the nation, gathered at the river’s edge to join the heroes in facing down a horde of syntheticalien demons known as the Outriders. This is the flashpoint of an epic battle in Avengers: Infinity War (out April 25), and it’s not just about saving the world this time—earth’s mightiest heroes, and some from much farther away, are trying to save the entire universe from a genocidal tyrant who’d like to kill off half of it. No pressure. Right now, the cast and crew of the biggest team-up in superhero-movie history have a real-world problem to confront. The river is fake, of course. It was dug out of a grassy horse field near Atlanta, Georgia, and giant pumps at either end recirculate the water as needed. The savanna is a lot closer to the city of Savannah, Georgia, than to any plains of Africa. The fictional skyscrapers of Wakanda are represented for now by a greenscreen, and the Outrider attackers are actors in speckled motion-capture suits.
But the approaching rainstorm happens to be real. Chris Hemsworth lowers his battleaxe and looks off into the distance, wondering aloud if he saw lightning. The God of Thunder is in a race against his own superpower.
If the production is close enough to see a flash, union rules stipulate that everyone has to take shelter for 30 minutes. They might not have that long before the downpour begins, so directors Anthony and Joe Russo are hurrying to get their shots while supervising multiple camera units on different scenes. For instance, on the other side of the river, Sebastian Stan’s character Bucky Barnes, now known to his Wakandan friends as “White Wolf,” is laying waste to Outriders while Rocket (in the form of actor Sean Gunn, wielding a puppet stand-in) distracts him with some offers he can easily refuse.
“How much for the gun?” the furry dealmaker asks, admiring the firepower clutched by Bucky’s mechanical limb. “It’s not for sale.” “OK, how much for the arm? The arm?” Rocket persists. (He has a weird thing about prosthetics.)
The strength of Infinity War is not just in assembling what appears to be the entire roster of Marvel’s cinematic superheroes in common cause, it’s in pairing the oddest of couples.
Even Hemsworth and Chris Evans, on the other side of the water, are watching video playbacks and conspiring to make Thor and Cap’s reunion just a little bit weirder.
Evans suggests that when they bump into each other, they do what friends often do after being apart for a while: assess each other’s haircuts. In some ways, they’ve swapped styles. Thor has a clean-cut trim, while Cap is now sporting the ragged locks and beard.
“I’ll be like, ‘Short hair now? Good choice,’” Evans says, while miming a right hook against an invisible Outrider.
“And I’ll go, ‘Yours, too. The beard. Very rugged,’” Hemsworth says. They’re still workshopping it as they go back in front of the cameras. But before they can complete their takes, lightning crackles nearby, followed by curtains of stinging rain that send the whole production stampeding for cover. WHO’S Day 1 on the set comes to an abrupt and muddy end.
Maybe that Cap and Thor exchange will make it in, maybe it won’t. The thing about Infinity War is you can’t really be sure what will survive.
This movie is a culmination, a punctuation mark on 10 years of superhero storytelling that changed the way movies are made. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios and mastermind behind its interlocked universe of films (now totalling 19, with more on the