We don’t need another hero
Movie’s screenwriters grapple with an overflow of star power
Every writer has to face the terror of a blank page. Consider screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely as they set about the daunting task of writing Avengers: Infinity War, described as a final chapter in 10 years of mega-budgeted superhero stories over 19 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. It has more than 20 main characters from different worlds, making for a tangled web of seemingly conflicting tones, egos, actors and plots. Sure, there was overlap before, but imagine attempting to create a cohesive mash-up of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, the Thor films, the Avengers films, the Captain America films, the Doctor Strange film, the Spider-Man films and the Black Panther film. It turns out the formula, at least initially, was somewhat straightforward for a movie with a budget rumoured to be as high as $400 million. It began with a list. “We had a wall of character names,” says Markus, in an interview alongside McFeely with Postmedia in Los Angeles the day before the red-carpet première of Infinity War. “It was literally everyone who was accessible in the MCU. We would say ‘I’d like to see Rocket talk to that guy, or I’d like to see that guy talk to that guy.’ We had a list of just fun pairings and a list of people who, just story-wise, were going to need to come together at some point on a momentum level and also people who just cancelled each other out.” “Strange alchemy is what we called it,” McFeely says.
The two writers are MCU veterans. They’ve written the three Captain America films and Thor: The Dark World. They also wrote the as-yet untitled fourth Avengers movie, already been filmed.
“We spent a lot of time blue-skying what it means to have all these characters and what story could accommodate that,” McFeely says. “So you’re not doing 25 people moving from room to room having conversations and suddenly some Oscar winner hasn’t spoken in 20 minutes.
“So we try to come up with a story that was simple enough but could weave simple plots together. It will look complex as a whole, but each individual plot is pretty straightforward and is based on one guy coming to take your stuff.” The mixed reviews have started rolling in for Infinity War, directed by filmmaking brothers Anthony and Joe Russo. “The guy coming to take your stuff ” is Thanos (Josh Brolin), a hulking, purple supervillain determined to collect a batch of magical “Infinity stones” to gain ultimate power.
This pits him against a hastily assembled team of superheroes including Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, the entire gang from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Black Panther and his Wakanda crew.
That’s a lot of heroes, and it doesn’t even include 10 or so hangers-on and sidekicks along for the ride. Clearly, to justify this force, Thanos needed to be a formidable foe.
“He’s the greatest villain in the Marvel universe,” McFeely says. “That’s a high bar. Certainly some are better than others, but the ones that are good are really good. He’s powerful, he’s relentless, he sympathetic to a degree and I think that’s going to surprise people. People are going to be drawn to him and feel guilty that they are drawn to him.”
It’s fun to speculate what may have happened if the upcoming Fox-Disney $52.4-billion megamerger, announced in December, had occurred a few years ago. The deal would theoretically allow Fox’s Marvel characters such as the X-Men and Deadpool to be integrated with those currently in the Marvel universe, such as Black Panther and Spider-Man and the Avengers. As veteran Marvel scribes, could Markus and McFeely foresee a project when the Wolverine and Deadpool, for instance, start hanging out with Tony Stark?
Both seem legitimately relieved they don’t have to worry about it for now.
“I imagine if and when Marvel does actually get their hands on these characters, they are going to recast them,” Markus says. “So who would you put in this movie? A guy who just happens to have claws and isn’t Hugh Jackman? Then you’re casting the world’s most important character and really not putting the thought into it: ‘Hey, that guy has mutton chops!’” As for the fourth instalment of Avengers, set for release just over a year from now, Markus and McFeely say it shouldn’t be considered Part II of Infinity War. “We intend them to be very different experiences,” McFeely says. “They are practically different genres, I’ll tell you that. It will feel that way. We don’t want — and certainly other movies have been accused of this — to tell one big story, cut it in half, and steal your money.”