Marvel Studios’ “Avengers: Infinity War” sees Josh Brolin’s Thanos traversing the universe to collect the six Infinity Stones he has long been in pursuit of. It turns out though the 149-minute movie is missing a good portion of its first act.
Though the film features its ensemble of regular heroes, Thanos is essentially the main character here – his actions are what drive the story forward. It turns out he had plenty more screen time initially as the character’s creator Jim Starlin has revealed that the studio shot a 45-minute segment centering around his acquisition of the first Infinity stone.
The theatrical cut of the movie begins with Thanos already in possession of one Infinity Stone – the Power Stone seen in “Guardians of the Galaxy” that was left in the hands of the Nova Corps on planet Xandar.
Speaking with Near Mint Condition, Starlin says Marvel actually shot the whole sequence of Thanos destroying Xandar to get the Power Stone. However the scene was discarded before any VFX work was done and so now all happens off screen. Starlin says:
“About a month before the movie came out, I got an email or something from Joe saying, ‘the 45 minutes of Thanos that we had at the beginning of Infinity War, we had it cut.’
There was a whole sequence of him getting the first gem and they had to cut that out. They shot it, but they never wanted to spend the money on the effects and they didn’t want the movie to be as long as the second one [Endgame] was. They didn’t realize it was going to be quite the hit it was.”
The movie ended up being a big success, taking in more than $2 billion and is still the second most profitable MCU movie behind only “Avengers: Endgame”.
Marvel Studios has been lining up Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) as the next overarching villain that’ll torment the MCU for the next few years – but it’s not clear if the disappointment of the recent “Ant-Man” will impact those plans.
