A Spoiler-filled Discussion of Avengers: Infinity War

So, there’s going to be spoilers in this. Obviously. You have been sufficiently warned.

Turn away now if you haven't seen Infinity War! This is your last chance!

Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get down to business.

I almost docked half a star from the Avengers: Infinity War review I posted on my site last week because it had a post-credits scene. That sounds petty, but I can be a pretty petty guy from time to time.

Perhaps I should explain.

As I mentioned in my review of the movie, I have a lot of procedural issues with how Marvel Studios, Disney and Kevin Feige run their cinematic universe. None of those qualms are business-focused, obviously (how could they be with the amount of money these things make?) but it’s easy to see how they will double down on business over story considerations (or, maybe a little more explicitly, movie structure considerations). No one ever dies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That was made painfully clear when Vision blew a hole through War Machine’s chest during the airport fight of Captain America: Civil War and he lived to tell the tale. It’s a cynical move, designed to maximize the ability of the Marvel stakeholders to leave the door open for what they need going forward. Sure, there’s never going to be a solo War Machine movie, but maybe that handful of hardcore War Machine stans will stay away from a movie or two if their beloved character is killed. You don’t know if that’s the truth or not, so why risk it?

The “why risk it?” ethos is exactly what Marvel Studios blows to hell in the third act of Avengers: Infinity War. There were deaths along the way; the movie starts with Thanos and his goons putting both Loki and Heimdall to the sword (literally in the case of Heimdall), after all, but it was easy to still think that they would find a way out of it. Doctor Strange has already shown his ability to rewind time, so maybe by the end of it, when all was said and done and Thanos lie broken and defeated, they could just work some Eye of Agamotto magic and bring them back. You reset the table so every possibility remains in front of you. And, let’s be real, I’m sure that by the time credits roll on whatever they’re calling the Avengers movie coming out in May 2019, that table will be reset in the way we all expect it to. That’s how Infinity Gauntlet worked out, after all. If Thanos can make half of the universe wink out in an instant, someone else can undo that just as easily.

That’s not meant to trivialize what they do with the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Thanos wins. He completes the gauntlet (leaving the cratered head of Vision before him as his final conquest) and wipes out half the universe (and well more than half of the assembled superheroes), a megalomaniacal attempt to create balance and solve problems like world hunger and inequality that comes from overpopulation (he’s not trying to court Death in this one, a likely shrewd move, as having Death embodied as a character Thanos is trying to get busy with is probably a bit too abstract a concept for mainstream audiences). He says at one point that he expects to wake up to a new world, shining and prosperous, and smile as its source of salvation. And that’s exactly what he does. The wry grin creeps across his lips and the movie cuts to black, with a somber, simple credit roll of white text on a black screen to follow. It’s a stark departure from the rousing credit sequences of Marvel movies past, and a further departure when there’s no mid-credits scene teasing the next movie.

Because how could you tease another movie after that? How could you talk about what’s coming next when you just watched half of the superheroes Marvel has been building up over the last ten years crumble into dust? We can see where they’re going. The Big Three of the Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America and Thor) are still around. They are destined to lead the fight against Thanos next May. There's a good chance they're destined to lay down their lives to save those we lost here. If the comic book is any indication, Nebula (one of the few we don’t see get dusted) still has a larger role to play.

As an aside, you’ve gotta wonder if the Disney executives maybe had some second thoughts when they watched the final cut of Black Panther dissolving into nothingness just a few scant months after his movie became the most successful Marvel movie of all time (and third most successful movie ever, for now at least) at the domestic box office. Of course, they know it’s all going to be reset, and we know it’s all going to be reset. That’s never a question, not really. Still, it’s quite the experience to see a pop culture phenomenon get so callously thrown away like that.

But the biggest indication of what is to come is given to us in the post-credits scene, where the returning Nick Fury and Maria Hill are seen experiencing Thanos' rapture without the context to know what's going on before getting dusted themselves, only for Fury to send out a distress signal in the form of the logo of Captain Marvel before they cease to be. The Captain Marvel movie is coming out a few months before Avengers next year, and while it might not seem to make sense that anything else MCU-related could happen until we get this whole “murdering half the universe” thing squared away, that movie is set in the 90’s so you can get away with it.

As another aside, how in the blue hell is Ant-Man and the Wasp coming out this summer after the events of Infinity War? They have to make it clear that it happens before Thanos annihilates half of the known universe, right? Do they expect anyone to care about Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly gallivanting off in bodysuits after we just saw Spider-Man collapse into a pile of dust? They would never do this because it leaves too much money on the table, but they really should have just shut it all down for a year, with no MCU movies (save the Captain Marvel one, because it explicitly takes place well before any of these events happen) until this stuff sorts itself out. But again, nine times out of ten, they’re going to side with business and profit over storytelling. It’s the reality of the world we live in.

The post-credits stinger serves its purpose. It pushes us inexorably forward, the march of the box office continuing. But did we really need it? After the deaths of so many beloved characters, after they finally shed the bright jokey happy-go-lucky overtones of what’s preceded it (the stillness and the dread when all the heroes know Thanos has arrived on Earth before you even see him is damn near masterful), after they finally established and some true blue stakes and had the gall to not pay any of it off in the slightest, after skipping over the now standard mid-credits scene, they're making bold moves. For them, at least. And the post-credits scene undermines that ever so slightly. As I sat in the theater, all of us silently considering what we’d just seen, I hoped beyond hope that they would have the guts to see it through to the end. No post-credits scene telling us where we’re going. No ray of hope. How could there be hope?

Marvel gave us a ray of hope because that’s the sort of thing you do here. They want you to know Captain Marvel is on the way, and that someone could end up turning the tide. But we know the tide is being turned. We know they wouldn’t just throw up their hands, throw away half their characters and just let Thanos run the world with his unchecked power. We know there's going to be another Black Panther movie. We know that the Guardians of the Galaxy will be back in time to get royally messed up by Adam Warlock. This could be the end of the original run of Avengers (I'm not so sure those who survived the culling will survive its aftermath). Iron Man, Cap and Thor all got their three solo movies. Their stories have run their course. They’re ripe to be replaced by Black Panther and Captain Marvel as the new paradigm of the Avengers, backed up by the likes of Scarlet Witch and Winter Soldier and I guess Ant-Man? I don’t think it’s a stretch to expect that to be the new status quo by the end of Avengers 4. That post-credits scene passes the SHIELD torch pretty definitively from Nick Fury and Maria Hill to Carol Danvers.

But it didn’t have to. We didn’t need that hope. And it’s not like no one will see Captain Marvel next year if it isn’t called out with a post-credits tease. Disney’s honestly gotten pretty good at this whole marketing thing. I would have loved to see Avengers: Infinity War not give us any salvation, any light in the dark. Especially considering every single person who walks into the theater is 100% expecting a post-credits stinger. You kill their idols, you destroy the world they’ve been watching for eighteen movies and ten years, and just when they think they’ll get a hint of what’s next, what to hope for, you give them nothing. Just white text on a black screen that says "Thanos will return." It would have been a hell of a thing. Marvel took a lot of chances with the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. I wish they would have taken just one more.