A major precursor to the ultimate MCU extravaganza, Avengers: Endgame, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity was hugely important to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you also take a look at the user ratings on FILMSTARTS, the movie with 4.5 out of 5 stars is not only one of the best comedy adaptations, but also one of the best movies ever. But maybe the movie would have could be better? Some Marvel fans are currently preoccupied with this question, because After nearly five years, “Avengers: Infinity War” has now been revealed to have been shortened by a whopping 45 (!) minutes before its release in theaters.
While it’s actually nothing unusual for individual shots or even entire scenes to fall victim to editing room shears, a cut of this magnitude is a special case, as Thanos creator Jim Starlin now interviews with cheated. Because 45 minutes is the equivalent of almost a third of the final movie, which probably would have changed it significantly.
“Avengers: Infinity War”: So much Thanos is missing from the final movie
2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” kicked off the great superhero crossover, in which ten years after the first MCU movie (“Iron Man”), the stories of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and Co. culminated in an epic spectacle. The Avengers took on supervillain Thanos (Josh Brolin), who gradually grabs the Infinity Stones, making him an ever-growing threat. But what some fans already found angry in the cinema: Thanos is directly in possession of the power stone – how it came about was never shown.
The stone was locked in the possession of the Xandarian Nova Corps at the end of Guardians Of The Galaxy, so it’s safe to assume Thanos was able to defeat the Xandarian army. But we didn’t see any of that. That’s exactly what almost happened in “Infinity War”.
“They shot it, but they didn’t want to spend the money on the effects. And they didn’t want the movie to last as long as the second one [Anm. d. Red.: ‚Avengers: Endgame‘] is becoming”, Starlin recalls. In conversation with he revealed that it was 45 minutes into the movie that showed Thanos acquiring the first Infinity Stone.
Starlin, who long assumed this ending sequence would also be seen in “Infinity War,” only got the bad news shortly before its theatrical release: “About a month before the movie came out, I got an email or something from Joe Russo,” which he eventually explained to him, “We had to cut it out.”
We’ll probably never find out if 45 extra minutes would have made the movie better in the end. With a gigantic running time, which would have been well over 200 minutes, it would certainly be conceivable that some moviegoers would have saved themselves the ticket to catch up on the film later from the comfort of their couch. Would the film then have grossed more than two billion dollars, making it the sixth highest-grossing film of all time?