We’re just a few weeks away from the release of Avengers: Infinity War — its release date was recently bumped up a week to April 27th — and now, Marvel has released new trailer to stir up some more excitement for the upcoming superhero showdown.
Infinity War promises to be one of the biggest films Marvel has ever made, combining almost every single superhero from across the 18-film franchise that began 10 years ago with the release of Iron Man in 2008. As the star-studded trailer shows, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, Chris Evans’ Captain America, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, the rest of the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and pretty much every other ancillary character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe are back.
All these highly paid actors will be joining forces against the villainous Thanos (Josh Brolin), the big bad that Marvel has been teasing in post-credit stingers since the first Avengers film was released six years ago. Thanos is trying to gather the six Infinity Stones, the MacGuffin items of power from across the various Marvel films. And judging by the trailer, it’ll be an uphill battle to stop him.
The final Infinity War trailer presents a terrifying, monumental threat to earth. Armies clash. Dead bodies are strewn about the screen. Music blares. Impressive percussion stirs up emotions. Lightning cracks. And at the center of it all is… Thanos! The terrifying universe-destroyer! Who, unfortunately, looks like a bald purple plastic mannequin with weird grooves in his chin to make up for the fact that he can’t grow a beard.
There’s no kind way to put it: Thanos isn’t impressive; he’s ridiculous. A villain named after death should look frightening, maybe with some sort of visual reference to death. Instead, Thanos comes across as an over-inflated cousin of Grimace from McDonald’s marketing. Except Grimace is actually kind of scary.
What went wrong at Disney’s special effects shop? It’s no particular mystery. The superhero craze has been facilitated by the amazing advances in computer graphics. CGI makes it possible to show Reed Richards’ body stretching like taffy or to portray Dr. Strange blasting mystic bolts of eldritch energy. Superfeats can be portrayed on film in ways they never could be before. In 1978, Superman posters promised “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Now, cinema can make you believe that a raccoon can shoot blaster guns and that Thomas the Tank Engine can grow to terrifying life-size. Anything is possible.
But to be more precise, anything is possible as long as that “anything” has slick, clean lines. This works pretty well for heroes. It makes sense for Iron Man’s high-tech billionaire-funded suit to be all hard edges and shiny surfaces. Even the monstrous Hulk works okay in CGI; the clarity of his features makes them more expressive and sympathetic, which is good since viewers are supposed to sympathize with him. CGI makes him look slightly unreal, and therefore less frightening than he could be. But that’s fine, since he’s not supposed to be frightening. He’s one of the good guys.
But villains are a problem. Superhero antagonists are meant to be terrifying, not generic or distractingly goofy. The slick definition of CGI makes Ultron look like a toy, not a threat. The CGI alien invaders in The Avengers are so blandly drawn that it’s difficult to even remember what they look like five minutes after they’re offscreen. That’s not even getting into the out-and-out disasters, like Doomsday from Batman v Superman, where the effort to render crusty, rocky horror in CGI makes it look like Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a poorly rendered cartoon. Or Ares in the final Wonder Woman battle, where a personal, face-to-face confrontation between enemies suddenly became a glossy, weightless video game cutscene.
Traditionally, the most visually impressive villain designs have involved more scrappy, traditional methods: makeup, prosthetics, costumes, and a healthy dose of ingenuity. The orcs and monsters in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy would have been a lot less impressive if WETA had tried to construct them all digitally. The original Star Wars trilogy’s Jabba the Hutt is so marvelously, viscerally disgusting because of the genius of the film’s puppeteers — a genius brought painfully home when George Lucas inserted an ill-conceived, rubbery CGI Jabba into later editions of the films. One of the scariest villains of the last 50 years, Darth Vader, is just a man in a mask.
Sometimes the best villains are often just talented actors being villainous, without any digital aid at all. For Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin or Heath Ledger as the Joker, special effects are superfluous. Michael Keaton just being Michael Keaton in Spider-Man: Homecoming was considerably scarier than Michael Keaton swooping around in his Vulture costume because the visibly human version of the character was so much more nuanced, personal, and specific. It’s no accident that the most visually successful superhero villain of the last few years is Hela from Thor: Ragnarok — a character where the CGI add-ons were all external and didn’t interfere with the core design, which was basically just “Cate Blanchett in goth makeup.” Hela’s menacing, flamboyant CGI horns are an undeniably inspired flourish, but they’re just a flourish. The Ragnarok effects team used CGI to push a solid design into glorious over-the-top camp, rather than relying on the computers to bring across the entire weight of Hela’s menace.
The problem with CGI villains isn’t that CGI is bad in itself. Used on characters that are meant to look disturbingly unreal, like the shape-changing T-1000 in Terminator 2, it’s an effective way of conveying an uncanny-valley alienness. The problem is that superhero filmmakers too often use CGI as a shortcut for monster design. CGI offers a lot of advantages and flexibility, and it’s an obvious go-to in creating characters like Thanos, who’s never really drawn as fitting into normal human dimensions. But CGI villains date poorly and rapidly. As the state of the art keeps getting pushed forward, last year’s CGI characters look steadily worse by comparison. Darth Vader in Star Wars is still chilling and intimidating 40 years after he first hit the screen. Justice League came out last year, and its villain, Steppenwolf, already looks cheaply rendered.
Computers are great tools, but they’re no substitute for the physicality of a human face and human expression. They’re also no substitute for imagination, inspiration, and a willingness to reassess when your cosmic purple threat looks like the love child of Vin Diesel and a prune. The real struggle in superhero films isn’t for world dominance, but to determine which will dominate the future, CGI or the accessible emotions of a visible human actor. In Infinity War, as far as Thanos is concerned, CGI won — and it looks like the audience lost.
Avengers: Infinity War has already broken advance ticket sales records on Fandango becoming the best-selling superhero movie ever — and it only took six hours. Tickets went on sale at 6AM PST/9AM EST today.
At this point in time, Avengers: Infinity War is outstripping the first day 24-hour ticket sales of both Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Fandango’s previous superhero first day advance-ticket seller, and Black Panther.
Back in January when we noticed that Black Panther was beating Captain America: Civil War as the highest Marvel pre-seller in 24 hours, we were cautioned by analysts about making lofty box office opening projections given the anomaly that the Ryan Coogler-directed was. No one believed a deeper universe character such as Black Panther would overindex to such great heights. But indeed, Black Panther beat the 3-day opening of Civil War, $202M to $179.1M.
In a Fandango survey of more than 1,000 moviegoers who snapped up Infinity War tickets this morning:
–97% can’t wait to see how dozens of heroes work together in the same film
–94% are excited to see different franchise characters (Guardians, Avengers, etc.) meeting one another for the first time.
–92% see “Infinity War” as the culmination of all of the MCU films before it.
–87% have seen all of the MCU movies.
–71% saw Black Panther on the big screen.
–60% claim Black Panther made them even more excited to see Avengers: Infinity War.
With every Fandango VIP purchase of Infinity War tickets, Fandango FanShop is offering a complimentary poster from the film sketched by artist Kaz Oomori, while supplies last (one example of image above).
Amid all the excitement surrounding Avengers: Infinity War—the beginning of the endgame of a decade of world-building in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that finally lets heroes like Iron Man and Star-Lord trade one-liners while a shirtless Dave Bautista stares blankly—there’s an overwhelming sense of dread. Most of that falls on the foreboding presence of Thanos (Josh Brolin), a towering purple alien who wants to destroy half the universe with the power of the infinity stones … for reasons unclear. (I guess when you’re powerful enough to destroy entire civilizations, you run out of things to keep yourself entertained.)
While the MCU has been largely hesitant about killing any of its heroes, Infinity War’s heightened stakes—as well as [cough] the fact the contracts of some of the franchise’s biggest actors are about to run out—make it clear that not everyone is going to survive the eponymous battle. That’s just how these things go: Han Solo met his end in The Force Awakens; Boromir in Lord of the Rings; Rachel (RACHAAAAAL!) in The Dark Knight; and so on.
But whose time is most likely to run out by the end of Infinity War? We’ve ranked the 10 heroes most likely to die, based on deductive reasoning, clues from the latest trailer that dropped Friday morning, and the general vibe surrounding certain characters heading into the April 27 release. Let’s start with the least likely candidate, and go from there.
10. Not Shuri
This is less of a prediction and more of a request: Shuri was one of the best parts of Black Panther, and her tech skills alone put Tony Stark to shame. Shuri is the most untouchable character in the MCU—just look how happy she is probably doing something that will stop Thanos in under five minutes!
Give this Wakandan princess all the good one-liners, have her fix a broken white boy or two, and don’t even tease us by putting her life in peril. Yes? Good.
9. Doctor Strange
Don’t ask me how, but in the latest Infinity War trailer Doctor Strange is ensnared by the evil cousin of Lord Voldemort!
That acupuncturist is getting the worst Yelp review. However, it’s still likely he’ll be known as the Doctor Who Lived, because Marvel only just introduced us to his psychedelic powers.
8. Pepper Potts
Pepper Potts will try to reason with Thanos about the wondrous health benefits of bee stings, and he will immediately obliterate her and say, “Seems like an overpriced gimmick.” (The rest of the Avengers will silently nod in agreement.)
7. Thor
Poor Thor: He just lost an eye in Thor: Ragnarok and now Thanos is using his head as a basketball.
Maybe a few Advils will do the trick, but that’s the most precarious position we’ve seen from any of the heroes in the Infinity War footage. Like, even Iron Man’s knockout punch doesn’t look as painful.
Of course, Thor’s death is definitely less likely than the other heroes’ because Marvel finally made a good Thor movie, and it’d be a waste to kill him off immediately after that. But still! Heads don’t like being crushed!
6. Hawkeye
This guy is bringing a bow and arrow to a fight against Thanos. RIP, we love your family in the woods.
5. Nebula
It feels like the MCU has really glossed over this, but Nebula and Gamora are Thanos’s adopted daughters! Imagine being raised by the guy who’s only happy when he’s destroying things 24/7. Nebula talks a bit about this in Guardians Vol. 2; how he used to force her and Gamora to fight, and when Nebula lost, he would mutilate her body, which made her resent Gamora.
That is … seriously messed up! Nebula became an antihero of sorts by the end of Guardians 2. A noble sacrifice—probably to save Gamora—could be in the cards.
4. Loki
Is Loki a hero or a villain in Infinity War? It’s quite unclear, but here’s my prediction: He teams up with Thanos, but at the sight of, say, his brother Thor almost being killed via skull-crushing, has a dramatic change of heart. It’s a valiant effort that’s enough to stop Thanos, but he somehow dies in the process.
At least, until the mid-credits scene … when he’s revealed to be alive, in disguise as someone else, à la The Dark World.
3. Captain America
Not that I’m complaining, but Captain America probably shouldn’t have made it this far if Civil War had stayed true to the comics. But his survival has blessed us with the sight of Bearded Chris Evans, which is very welcome and has possibly caused a seismic shift in the ever-evolving Chris Wars. Even elite-goatee-haver Thanos is like, “Wow, pretty good beard there.”
Nonetheless, going toe-to-toe with Thanos spells trouble. Captain America—an icon of another era, trapped in our time, and wholesome beyond belief—is the ultimate “tragic hero willing to sacrifice his life for the rest of humanity” kind of character. He jumped on a grenade in the first 30 minutes of Captain America: The First Avenger—my guy has been ready to die.
2. Vision
I don’t want to take away from the absolutely appropriate shipping of A.I. Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen, but Vision isn’t long for the MCU world. Thanos wants the infinity stones; Vision is quite literally a melding of Tony’s J.A.R.V.I.S. computer system and the mind stone. Thanos is definitely going to get his hands on the mind stone, which, in effect, will also wipe out Vision.
(For what it’s worth, we basically see this happen in the first trailer, too.)
1. Tony Stark/Iron Man
“I hope they remember you,” Thanos tells Tony Stark in the latest trailer, which, combined with the absolute whooping he received from Thanos in the first Infinity Wars trailer, is a pretty worrying combination of foreshadowing.
The MCU started with Iron Man 10 years ago, at a time when it wasn’t totally clear superhero movies would be this big—it’s only fitting that Robert Downey Jr. gets a tear-jerking hero’s sendoff to let the new class of Marvel heroes (Black Panther, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel) flourish. Also, Downey Jr. is 52 now—he’s gotta be so tired, and so ready for his character to die.
