CALIFORNIA, United States (Reuters) — It’s the moment that fans of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe have been waiting months for – the release of the “Avengers: Infinity War” trailer.
The film pulls together the ensemble casts from the different franchises, which include “Iron Man,” “Captain America,” “Thor,” “Ant-Man,” “Doctor Strange,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Black Panther” and “Spider-Man.”
“This is the culmination of ten years of film making and I think it’s unprecedented,” said the film’s co-director and co-writer Joe Russo after showing footage at the D23 Expo in July.
“I think Marvel’s been experimenting with film by taking multiple franchises and combining characters and so if they started writing a book ten years ago with ‘Iron Man’, we’re now at the end of the book and my brother and I get to write the final chapter to that book, so it’s pretty exciting,” he added.
Featuring around 25 superheroes, including Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Chris Pratt as Star-Lord, the film faces a unique challenge – giving each of the characters enough screen time.
“My brother (Anthony) and I have worked on a lot of ensemble movies over the years. Our first movie ‘Welcome to Colinwood’, we did ‘Arrested Development’, we did ‘Community’ so we’re always working with a lot of characters. We come from a big Italian family, I think we like that chemistry that comes from ensemble and then it was stepping stones from ‘Winter Soldier’ and then ‘Civil War’ which had a huge cast. It is not easy. It’s one of the most difficult thing to do to make sure all the characters are serviced properly and have arcs and are trackable but that’s the challenge of it and that’s what makes it different and exciting,” Russo said.
Since 2008, there have been 16 films produced by Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures each with different tones and styles.
“When you combine them, you get something that you haven’t seen before,” said Russo.
“The movie can move very deftly and very quickly depending on which character you’re with from one tone to another and if all these characters hadn’t been established and all these tones hadn’t been established, this would be an impossible story to tell but because you are coming to the film with all that emotional baggage you get something very different, very rich and very interesting.”
“Avengers: Infinity War” goes on release in the United States on May 4, 2018.