Marvel StudiosTony Stark looks solemnly into a warm pint of bitter, takes a bite from an over cooked burger and puts his last remaining pennies into the quiz machine as a pregnant Pepper Potts walks out arm in arm with Loki. End scene.
The internet is awash with fan theories, fan fictions, fan art and everything revolving around comic book universes as my attempt at an alternate dark ending above proves.
You’d feel the same if you crammed 19 Marvel films into your evenings over the space of a month only to find out immediately after the premiere what was about to happen.
That theory about spoilers not ruining plot lines – it’s a bunch of nonsense. I spent £10 at my local IMAX to spend two hours thinking ‘Just kill them all already, Thanos’.
But while us mere mortals will go to the lengths of breaking hearts with Elizabeth Duke jewellery, intergalactic nasty bit of stuff-cum-internet horndog daddy, Thanos went about things in a more cinematically pleasing way, traversing the galaxies, killing all kinds of folk to collect the Infinity Stones to put on a big glove before snapping his fingers to wipe out half of existence. Smell the glove.
That’s not to say already knowing what was going to happen didn’t make it a great watch, even if the producers thought it was best to not have a plot line relying on the best jewels a tenner can buy at Argos.
The $2 billion it made at the box office suggests they knew what they were doing all along, and knew it was the right call.
But in a Slashfilm interview this week, VFX Supervisor, Dan DeLeeuw, said they had something a bit more brutal in mind for the final scenes of Infinity War.
After Thanos succeeds in his mission, he was to be shown in the Soul World where he encounters a young Gamora once again.
‘One of the early ideas was to have him walking on a river of blood, intended to represent the blood of his victims,’ Slashfilm report.
However DeLeeuw told the site ‘it got a bit dark’, so they explored other ideas, settling for what we all now know.
Deleeuw said:
Generally we go long, go for a wide, longer cut, so we can pick out the best gags as we go along with it.
There’s alternate versions of all the scenes. There’s an alternate of the wizards battle with Strange and Thanos. The smaller version ends up in the film.
Kelly Port, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor said:
For us, from a studio perspective, we get a lot of this stuff that’s cut together. It’s a road map that’s pretty solid. Sometimes we’d get the way station, we’d have ‘This is what it’s like after he’s snapped his fingers’.
What that world with Gamora [would look like]. How that’s represented. We went through an exploratory phase with that one, looking at different options. That went through some changes.
Marvel StudiosWell, doesn’t that make you feel better about everything? No, oh well, there’s only about eight months until our heroes return, some of them presumably from the dead or wherever it is they went after they turned to dust.
I’m booking my ticket already. Not letting the next part be ruined by spoilers from idiots on the internet like me.
Avengers 4 will be in cinemas April 26, 2019.
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Tim Horner is a sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated with a BA Journalism from University College Falmouth before most his colleagues were born. A previous editor of adult mags, he now enjoys bringing the tone down in the viral news sector.