Was there any concern about these characters possibly overshadowing the main story or distracting from that?
Stephen: No, because you have to be confident that there’s enough gravity to the story you’re telling that it’s going to carry its own weight. It helps that Spider-Man was providing a lightness to the movie, so you knew he wasn’t going to bring a competing drama to it. He’s there in contrast. And Panther is part and parcel to the story. The better he works, the better the regular story works because this is a guy who is deeply aggressive and really sets the actions of either Bucky or the real villain in motion.
So let’s say Spider-Man and Black Panther weren’t in the movie. Had you been considering any other characters to fill those roles?
Chris: We had a draft with Wasp in it at one point. There are upsides to that: You have another female superhero, another person on the tarmac for the airport fight. But because she didn’t really become a superhero in “Ant-Man,” we’d be sort of doing that off screen, and that felt a little bit unfair.
Stephen: We talked about bringing Hank Pym in at one point. We were primarily concentrating on who can we bring in from the existing universe. We didn’t bring out on the table anybody like…and Moon Knight shows up in the third act! We were playing with what we had.
If we let it just consume itself with gravity, it wouldn’t be fun anymore. Everything still has to be fun; you’re still at a superhero movie.
Chris: We don’t have time for origin stories. Black Panther’s origin story is slight — his father dies in the movie, and he becomes king [of Wakanda]. That’s it. He’s already been Black Panther, and hopefully you’ll find out more about that in his own movie. And with Spider-Man, we assumed the audience has seen at least one of those [previous] movies. So, we can shorthand Uncle Ben and “with great power comes great responsibility” and leave that for the next movie. They were uniquely qualified for our purposes. We just couldn’t do an origin story; the movie would grind to a halt.
It seems to me that the public perception of the Avengers is even more damaged now because they’re seen as unstable and they’re fighting each other. Will ‘Infinity War’ address that in some way?
Stephen: It has to, because otherwise we’re undermining ‘Civil War’ if people aren’t still stinging from what happened.
Christopher: The first scene in ‘Infinity War’ cannot be Steve and Tony shaking hands. [Laughs]
Stephen: That will only make ‘Infinity War’ more interesting. The last two ‘Avengers’ were a unified group fighting an enemy. If we made a third one [like that] it would just be meh.
Christopher: There’s a different curvature to those movies.
The Russos recently said they view ‘Infinity War’ as two separate movies. What’s your take on that?
Stephen: We definitely think they are two separate experiences. They’re not disconnected, obviously. Everyone’s very conscious about not just putting something in the middle and making it one long movie. We don’t really have a problem that some other movies have that are based on a very famous novel, where the audience knows that you’re cutting an act.
Chris: There will be an end in the first one. It will not feel like you just hit pause. There’s more story to tell but it’s not going to be, “I wonder what happens?”
Will there be new characters in ‘Infinity War’?
Stephen: Sure. I mean, we’ll be real cagey to you about this, Kevin, but…I mean, and there’s so many returning characters, the last thing I need is more characters, but that’s what we’re getting anyway. [Laughs]
