Avengers Infinity War writers reveal why they ended the movie with a snap

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the writers behind Avengers: Infinity War, spoke to the New York Times about sequels - specifically second installments - and why they chose to end Infinity War with a cliffhanger.

Markus said that the reason they split the story into two parts wasn’t because there was too much story to tell, but because it was always part of the plan to end this iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a two-part finale. They said that they had always intended to end the first film with the infamous ‘snap’ - the moment the supervillain Thanos unites all six Infinity Stones and snaps his fingers to ‘kill’ half the universe’s population, including half the Avengers.

This image released by Disney shows Josh Brolin as Thanos in a scene from Marvel Studios Avengers: Infinity War. (AP)

Markus said that there was an initial draft of the script in which the snap happened right at the end, “But what we realised is, it would feel more like a cliffhanger than we intended,” he said. Instead, they wrote a script for part 1 “that went all the way to a tragic ending. And then one where mysterious things happen that I can’t tell you about.”

Infinity War was received positively by critics and fans, and is poised to enter the most exclusive of blockbuster movie clubs - only three films in history have crossed the $2 billion mark at the box office. And Infinity War will join Titanic, Avatar and Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the next few days.

However, Markus and McFeely - who previously wrote all three Captain America movies for Marvel - don’t think they’ve written a perfect script for Infinity War. “Had we started from scratch, we would not have chosen six damn MacGuffins,” McFeely said, referring to the objects that act as plot devices in stories. In Infinity War, the six Infinity Stones were the MacGuffins.

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