How the Writers of Avengers: Infinity War Made the Biggest Superhero Movie of All Time

It’s safe to say there's never been a movie of the scale of Avengers: Infinity War. This Friday, the culmination of nearly ten years of storytelling across eighteen movies comes to a head in the span of just two hours and 40 minutes. And that's just the start.

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are old hands in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now. They've written, or co-written, six movies in the franchise already, going back to their first gig on 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger. They've been living and breathing this world for years. All the same, they know what a ridiculous undertaking a blockbuster with 20-something main characters is, especially when some of those characters have been shaped in the hands of other writers and filmmakers.

GQ spoke to Markus and McFeely about when they first sat in front of a blank screen to write the biggest superhero movie of all time, how they plan to shock audiences who think they can see everything coming, and, of course, the 2013 movie Thor: The Dark World.

GQ: This is going to be an exciting summer for you guys. .

Christopher Markus: If only.

Stephen McFeely: We hope. My number might need to be unlisted.

Are you anticipating...let's call it a strong reaction?

McFeely: I think so?

Markus: Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it'll be a strong positive reaction. It is not another episode of the Avengers, let's put it that way. There's something different.

I know you can barely say anything that we don't know already.

Markus: Well that's the weird thing, right? They're not even gonna show this movie to anybody until the very last second.

Tell me about when was the first time you guys actually sat down and started with a blank page to write Avengers 3?

McFeely: We put pen to paper not long after we got the gig, which was like April of 2015. We were just about to start shooting Civil War. The first couple hours of every day on the big movies are the only time that Chris and I are really required [to be there], because that's when lines have been changed or blocking will change or things like that. After a couple hours, we would go to our office and start cracking open all things Thanos and every comic related to this arc, asking, "What could this be?"

Markus: It was really the last time the page was completely blank. There have been many drafts, some of which bear no resemblance to each other.

How different was it right at the very beginning?

Markus: Actually, at the very beginning, it was not completely unlike what it is. We sort of went down a different path in the middle. Then we came back to realizing that the first draft had its benefits.

McFeely: We moved teams around, though, for sure. Without spoiling everything, there were various pairings we had in the first draft that we jettisoned for other pairings.

I've heard that directors and writers from across the MCU are also involved. Were there ever any disagreements?

Markus: I mean, we mostly consulted with the various writers and directors who were still in production about where they were intending to take their characters in their movie so that we know where to pick them up. The ones we had the most concern about were obviously Ant-Man, Wasp, and Captain Marvel, in that they come in between our two movies. We had to make sure, for our good and theirs, that they were fully cognizant of what they were walking into by coming out in between the two Avengers films.

Markus: We politely asked, "Could you do this one thing, maybe just at the end, which would help us out a lot?" There were remarkably few arguments.

How do you even go about writing a movie like this? How much is set in stone story-wise? How much freedom do you have to really play around?

Markus: I would say we have more freedom than you'd think.

McFeely: Right. Kevin [Feige] is the one who says we should do Infinity War. But that's Infinity War based on the comics. What does it look like in the MCU as it exists now?

Then we go off and write, and it's not like Chris and I say, "This absolutely has to happen!" and then Marvel quakes in their boots. But we will present ideas. There's not usually a mandate or dictate from on high. That said, Kevin is certainly involved creatively, particularly as we get into the later stages of everything. He's got a great eye for storytelling—what the audience wants, expects, and how to surprise them.

One of the blessings of this one was, because everything was on the table, it allowed us some really big swings. There are major consequences, big stakes. Marvel said anything is possible, so we tried a lot of things.

Markus: We also have two movies to play with. The story really is too big for one movie. I do not like to think of what Infinity War would have been had we had to tell the whole story in two hours.

McFeely: We just would have told a different story.

Markus: Yeah, I think we wouldn't have done Infinity War, to be perfectly honest with you.

Tell me a little bit about how do you do right by these characters when there are approximately one billion of them in the movie?

McFeely: You don't try to do too much. We had a little experience on this with Civil War, which looks like a class project compared to this. You target some characters for larger arcs, and you target other characters for smaller arcs. We freed ourselves from the guilt of trying to give everyone the same exact story space.

Markus: We always keep our eye on the story, and you only bring in the characters when the story demands that they enter. Even if they had a smaller amount of screen time, if they're there for the story, they matter. If you're wedging them into a scene, you can feel their extraneousness.

I want to go back to that thing you said about how you had two movies to play around with. However things land, this is still one movie, in that it's coming out as one movie and people are buying tickets to one movie. Will someone who has never seen a Marvel movie before, who buys a ticket to this, then drops dead immediately and doesn't see Avengers 4—will they have a good time?

McFeely: Oh, yes.

Markus: I think they'll definitely have a good time. They might not have as layered an experience as someone who's getting all the references and callbacks... These are two very different movies in tone and in approach, but it is a story that begins in one and ends in the other. I think if you're dying in between movies, you have more to worry about than whether or not you enjoyed our movie.

McFeely: But it's weird, right? Marvel's retraining the audience in a way. Ten years ago you couldn't start a film with 25 characters and with the assumption that you know who they are. People have, whether lovingly or begrudgingly, gotten used to the idea that these are sequential, and that they're collective.

Markus: We don't start every movie with "previously on the Marvel Cinematic Universe," because that would be an hour. We had to train ourselves as well. We came from a school where you introduce your characters. It's a little different with these when you get 18 and 23 movies down the road.

I remember when I went to see Civil War with someone who had never seen a Marvel movie before, and they whispered, "What the fuck?" when Vision came through the wall. They were delighted, though.

Markus: [laughs] I'm always amazed by the human ability to separate understanding from enjoyment. We'll go to test screenings and ask, "Did you like the movie?" They'll say, "Yeah, it was excellent." "Did you understand the movie?" "No." They just don't seem mutually exclusive.

Tell me a little bit about what Thanos has been up to, what he's been feeling before we see him in the movie.

McFeely: Oh, I don't even know how much we can say about that.

Markus: I don't know if we can tell you that. I can tell you Thanos is...concerned about the state of the universe. He believes that there is only one person out there who can make the necessary adjustment.

McFeely: It was our goal to make him a fully realized character. He's been teased very briefly, so this movie would only work if you really understand him and are scared of him.

It could have been a hard sell. You've got this huge purple guy who we still haven't really seen much of. You've gotta build him up as a credible threat. He also seems oddly philosophical.

McFeely: "Oddly philosophical" can be on his gravestone...if he ever has a gravestone.

Markus: He'll never die!

McFeely: I would say he's not conflicted, but he's certainly philosophical.

Markus: He's a consummate philosopher. The way we approached him is that the first movie is Thanos's movie—he is the protagonist—and that we're going to spend as much time as we need to with him to understand where he's coming from, understand what he wants to do so that he's not just a mystery character, an ominous CGI cloud who appears.

He has a specific and understandable reason for wanting to change the universe, then?

McFeely: Yes.

Markus: But we're not gonna tell you what it is.

I figured.

McFeely: It's probably not something you're expecting.

Looking into the future, I'm curious about if there's an obscure Marvel character you'd like to pitch Marvel for a movie.

Markus: There are some guys, although who knows who'll be available after next summer. But also, who's obscure anymore? Marvel has had amazing success with bringing people out who never could have launched a few years ago. Had you heard of Groot? He's a star now.

I'm a huge fan of the Vision, and I'd love to see a solo movie of his. But with the Mind Stone embedded in his forehead, he's got one hell of a black mark going into the Avengers movies, doesn't he?

McFeely: Not to get too screenwriter-ly, but we wanted to make sure that Thanos, when he came for the stones, it wasn't just a shopping cart. If you get the Mind Stone, there's a number of people who are gonna be affected by that. If you get the Time Stone, well, that's around Doctor Strange's neck, there are gonna be good people who are bothered by that. Then there are Thanos's daughters.

Markus: There's a lot of emotional connection throughout that we spent three years on. A lot of writing this was trying to figure out how to combine plot and character in a satisfying way throughout.

Obviously, there are decades of comics to base this movie on, but were there other movies or other genres that you were interested in pulling from as well?

McFeely: Yeah. [Infinity War directors] the Russo brothers mention a lot of movies like Three Days in the Valley or Out of Sight, these ’90s heist movies. Even something like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels where you're cutting around to various people who have different interests in the crime at hand.

Markus: I'd say maybe not tonally but structurally, we looked to things like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings where you have these vast landscapes and groupings of people who don't necessarily interact for long stretches of time. Yet you still come away feeling like you've been told one big story, not four little stories.

What do you want people to know before they see Infinity War?

Markus: There are people coming that you do not expect, and when you see them, you're going to be the happiest you've ever been.

McFeely: I want to talk to people in 2019, in a way, you know? Where people can stand back and go, "Oh, look at those two movies. Look at those two movies in between. Look at the puzzle they've crafted."

As a post-credits scene of sorts, I'd like to ask you about a Marvel movie I love but didn't connect the way many others have: Thor: The Dark World.

McFeely: That was a weird one. Thank you for liking it. We came in to help out a thing that needed help. We'll cash the checks, but it's not—

Markus: We have half ownership of that one. But there's a lot in there that I like. Frankly, I think if we'd had the Elves speak English, that movie would be viewed much more kindly. I think you cut Christopher Eccleston off at the knees when it's just like, "Here, just speak some nonsense." He's a great actor, let him actually do that.

McFeely: It's also a testament to the MCU, right? The ones at the bottom, they usually tend to be Dark World and Iron Man 2?

That seems fair.

McFeely: Those are still so much better than most other superhero movies most other studios are putting out. I feel that it's definitely getting graded on a curve.