Avengers: Infinity War: all the trailers, updates, and commentary for Marvel’s biggest film

Judging from a recent post on social media, fandom’s favorite average, everyday Marvel Cinematic Universe character is still alive after the population-halving Thanos snap in Avengers: Infinity War. Everyone who had him on their concern list can officially stop worrying.

While Thor’s roommate Darryl isn’t featured in the actual movies, he became a Marvel fan-favorite, thanks to a series of hilarious shorts that explained what Thor was up to during Captain America: Civil War and leading up to Thor: Ragnarok. As these videos told it, the thunder god just took it easy and tried to live a normal life, including living in a small Australian apartment with a somewhat twitchy flatmate. Granted, he wasn’t actually good at assimilating into mundane life, so there are plenty of hijinks, including an attempt to pay rent with Asgardian artifacts that are apparently worth a “gazillion” dollars.

Spoilers ahead for Avengers: Infinity War.

Avengers: Infinity War is an epic payoff for a decade of onscreen comics fandom. Over the past 10 years, Marvel Studios has released 18 films that lead up to the plot of Infinity War: The Incredible Hulk, three Iron Man movies, three Captain America movies, two previous Avengers movies, three Thor movies, two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Black Panther. All of them have plot threads that collide in Infinity War, and Marvel’s clear expectation is that people walking into the movie will have seen all the previous films.

Warning: plot spoilers ahead for Avengers: Infinity War.

Despite the title of Avengers: Infinity War, the lead character isn’t Iron Man, Captain America, or any of the other Avengers who protect the world from evil. From beginning to end, Joe and Anthony Russo’s blockbuster is about the eight-foot intergalactic big bad Thanos, played by Josh Brolin. Thanos is every bit as dominating and destructive as fans of the series could hope, but he isn’t the one-dimensional villain he so easily could have been.

Warning: spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead.

“Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe,” Thanos says in the first Avengers: Infinity War trailer. “But this does put a smile on my face.” He isn’t alone. When screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were plotting out the film, they certainly put a lot of thought into how to use humor to balance the story, and to shore up some of the most difficult plot obstacles Infinity War would inevitably face. Humor has been a signature of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the franchise launched with Iron Man in 2008. And humor is especially important throughout Infinity War — not just to distinguish Marvel movies from Warner Bros’ grim DC films, or Fox’s dour X-Men movies, or to shape heroes who are interesting because they can experience more than one emotion. It’s used strategically to address the film’s inherent problems, and ease viewers through them.

Warning: Major spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War lie ahead.

Everybody knew there would be deaths in Avengers: Infinity War. Nobody was prepared for how many. But now that the world has collectively gasped as hero after hero disappeared in Infinity War’s final moments, everybody knows they’re bound to come back, and that we shouldn’t take their deaths seriously. This is a comic book movie, and Marvel’s films operate by comic book logic that dictates no death lasts forever, except formative ones like Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben. (Plus, many of the affected characters have upcoming movies that were announced long ago.)

Warning: major spoilers ahead for Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War.

James Gunn is terrorizing Twitter again. The director and co-writer of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies is an active participant on the social media platform, and he frequently interacts with fans, sometimes to their dismay. Back in February, he casually mentioned to a fan asking a jokey question that Groot, the sentient tree character who became a breakout favorite character in the first Guardians, is dead. In the film, Groot is shattered while saving his friends, but his partner Rocket plants a piece of him which grows into a cute infant version of Groot. Judging from the fan reaction to Gunn’s revelation (which, in fairness, he said he’d made before, and that it made people upset every time), people who viewed the original Guardians mostly thought Baby Groot was a reincarnation of Original Groot, and just needed time to grow up. Nope, Gunn jerked that rug right out from under everybody.

The biggest movie and game of the moment are about to collide. Today, Epic Games revealed a new, limited time event coming to its battle royale game Fortnite, which will feature Avengers: Infinity War baddie Thanos. The crossover will come in the form of a new mode — creatively called “Infinity Gauntlet Limited Time Mashup” — where players will be able to scour the map to try and collect the Infinity Gauntlet containing all six Infinity Stones, which when equipped turn you into Thanos and grant a significant boost of power. We don’t yet know if the gauntlet will be randomly placed on the map or found at a distinct location.

According to Infinity War directors Joe and Anthony Russo, the pair are big fans of the game, and they would often sneak in rounds of Fortnite while editing the film. This, in turn, led to the idea for a mashup. “Out of the blue, I get this call from Joe. And after a bit of geeking out over each other’s work, we start brainstorming these crazy ideas,” Epic creative director Donald Mustard told Entertainment Weekly. “It was really important that whatever we did, it had to be super authentic to both Fortnite and the Avengers: Infinity War, and something that fans of both would be excited about.”

Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War has broken another record: it’s become the fastest movie to cross the $1 billion mark at the global box office, overtaking the prior record-holder, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Deadline reports that that the film reached this milestone in just 11 days: it took The Force Awakens 12 days in 2015. The film’s success thus far has allowed Disney to cross the $3 billion mark for its overall box office thus far in 2018. What’s notable here is that Avengers reached this milestone before it opens in China on May 11th — once it does, that number will likely jump considerably.

Warning: spoilers ahead for Avengers: Infinity War

For someone who claims he just wants to help the whole Universe, Thanos certainly is out to destroy a lot of it. In Avengers: Infinity War, the villain’s helpful strategy is genocide. As soon as he collects all the Infinity Stones and becomes omnipotent, he kills half the people in the Universe. Suddenly, bystanders in New York — and half the movie’s superheroes — turn into gray mush and disappear. But why is Thanos so convinced this is necessary?

Warning: Major spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War below.

When Avengers: Infinity War opened on April 27th, it exceeded even Disney’s own lofty expectations, besting Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the biggest box office opening in history. Given that it’s the film meant to bring together all previous 18 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Infinity War certainly had plenty of audience hype working in its favor. But it also had a secret weapon to help inspire interest: death.

“It’s 6 o’clock! Lower that screen!”

A thunderclap of shouts rolls in approval. The crowd at New York’s AMC Empire 25 is getting restless, but it would be unfair to call them impatient. After 11 consecutive Marvel movies, they’re ready to cap off a 31-hour marathon with a conclusion they’ve all been waiting for: Avengers: Infinity War. Just off of Times Square, dozens of fans, prepared with blankets, pillows, snacks, and caffeine, have committed to celebrating the long-anticipated release of Marvel’s latest film with a special marathon event.

In its opening weekend, Marvel Studio’s latest superhero film Avengers: Infinity War has broken the record for highest box-office total in its debut weekend, raking in $250 million, according to Deadline. It surpasses the record previously set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which pulled in $247 million when it debuted in 2015.

Avengers: Infinity War is the culmination of a decade of superhero films, and had a lot of momentum going into the weekend: it pulled in $39 million on Thursday night, and an estimated $106 million on Friday, according to Box Office Mojo. It then pulled in a record-breaking $83 million on Saturday. That’s just in the US: internationally, it’s pulled in an astounding $380 million, for a staggering $630 million global opening.

Avengers: Infinity War is now out in theaters, the culmination of 10 years of superhero movies. Starting with Iron Man in 2008, the franchise’s 19 installments have built on one another to form a massive, cohesive story. That’s daunting 31 hours of story that set up this latest movie. Fortunately, YouTube supercut channel Burger Fiction has you covered with a 17 minute video that hits all the high points of the franchise.

Burger Fiction has made a number of these sorts of compilations of everything from major Academy Award categories to the evolution of characters and actors over the history of cinema, to big franchise catch-ups.

Ever since Nick Fury first showed up at Tony Stark’s house to plug the Avengers Initiative at the end of 2008’s Iron Man, post-credit scenes have been a staple of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Sometimes they’re just a little gag, a bonus for sitting through the credits, like the sequence of the Avengers silently eating shawarma together in a partially wrecked New York City takeout after the catastrophic fight in The Avengers, or the Howard the Duck cameo after Guardians of the Galaxy. Much more often, though, they’re specific teases for a Marvel movie that’s coming up on the release docket, from the initial visit to Wakanda at the end of Captain America: Civil War to tease events in Black Panther to the various scenes introducing the villain Thanos long before he turns up in Avengers: Infinity War.

The Avengers: Infinity War post-credits scene is no exception. Anyone sticking around through the film’s credits, hoping for some bright spot to leaven the film’s grim ending, instead got an oblique reference to a Marvel movie headed to theaters in 2019. The tease will also certainly be relevant to the still-untitled Infinity War sequel, but that’s still more than a year and a couple other Marvel movies away. But for those who didn’t immediately recognize the significance of what they saw onscreen, here’s a rundown. Significant spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead, obviously.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

The DC’s Legends of Tomorrow episode “Here I Go Again.”

The most definitive overarching issue with the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the lack of stakes. Over the course of the saga’s previous 18 movies, MCU heroes have faced numerous world-ending threats, eking out victories by the skin of their teeth, only to have their worlds essentially return to normal in time for the next installment. The approach worked early, on a film-by-film basis, but when viewed as part of a 10-year narrative, it’s tended to weaken the broader franchise. There can be no drama without true risk, and in the MCU, audiences have learned that none of their favorites are ever really in harm’s way.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo seem acutely aware of this issue with their latest entry, the massive, multi-film team-up Avengers: Infinity War. The long-awaited face-off between the Avengers and Thanos (Josh Brolin), the MCU’s ultimate big bad, is massively entertaining, deftly incorporating dozens of characters across multiple storylines with a kinetic flair. Its devotion to banter and one-liners makes it one of the funniest movies in the studio’s history, but it’s also a film where very bad things happen to good people. After years of movies where even the most mediocre heroes appeared to be invulnerable and indomitable, it’s an arresting jolt — and exactly the film the franchise needed.

Warning: major spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron and the comics crossover event House of M ahead.

In 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel Studios introduced the speedster hero Quicksilver — and then promptly killed him off. There are a lot of potential reasons for Pietro Maximoff to die in the film series, rather than joining the Avengers with his sister Wanda, aka the Scarlet Witch. Marvel Studios may have wanted to avoid confusion with the version of Quicksilver appearing in the X-Men films. Avengers Tower was getting pretty crowded, as the MCU built up more and more characters. The film was also scripted and directed by Joss Whedon, who has a track record of killing off heroes at the ends of his stories. But the best reason for killing Quicksilver might have been to make Wanda suffer — and set up a chain of events that will fix Marvel’s big upcoming continuity problem in the process.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is following in Star Wars’ footsteps with a novelized expansion of its on-screen universe. Barry Lyga’s new novel, Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos—Titan Consumed, will give Avengers villain Thanos his own origin story when it hits shelves November 20th.

Thanos has long been teased as the be-all-end-all threat for the MCU’s Avengers; he’ll take center stage during the upcoming film Avengers: Infinity War. But as noted in Lyga’s novel, Thanos’ ability to wield the incredible power of Infinity Stones is hard-earned, and the big-chinned, purple villain walked a long road to get here. “Born on a doomed world and cast out by his people for his genius, physical deviancy, and pragmatic but monstrous ideas, Thanos is determined to save the galaxy from the same fate as his homeworld,” the summary reads. ”No matter how many billions have to die.”

We’re a few weeks out from the release of Avengers: Infinity War, perhaps the biggest superhero movie ever made. It’s a back-to-back two-parter, with the second half coming in 2019. And yet we still don’t know what the sequel is going to be called. Why the mystery?

For context: Infinity War was first announced back in 2014, when the two films were known as Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 and Avengers: Infinity War Part 2. Two years later, right before the release of Captain America: Civil War, the fourth (and currently final) Avengers film got a name change, dropping the “Infinity War Part 2” moniker in favor of an unannounced title. In an interview with Uproxx, Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo said, “The movies are two very different movies,” and that it would be “misleading” to simply call them Part 1 and 2, although they hadn’t decided on a new subtitle.

In January, movie ticket company Fandango reported that Black Panther set a record for ticket presales for Marvel movies (beating out 2016’s Captain America: Civil War’s previous record), setting up it up for a massive box office haul that’s since surpassed $1 billion. Tickets for Marvel’s upcoming Avengers: Infinity War just went on sale on Friday, and Variety reports that the ticket sales for the film have already blew past Black Panther’s record — in just six hours.

Marvel released its final trailer for the superhero team-up movie yesterday in conjunction with the start of ticket sales, which comes out on April 27th. Variety says that Fandango released results from a user survey that showed a high level of excitement for the film, but also that Black Panther “made them more excited to see Avengers: Infinity War.”

The final Infinity War trailer presents a terrifying, monumental threat to earth. Armies clash. Dead bodies are strewn about the screen. Music blares. Impressive percussion stirs up emotions. Lightning cracks. And at the center of it all is… Thanos! The terrifying universe-destroyer! Who, unfortunately, looks like a bald purple plastic mannequin with weird grooves in his chin to make up for the fact that he can’t grow a beard.

There’s no kind way to put it: Thanos isn’t impressive; he’s ridiculous. A villain named after death should look frightening, maybe with some sort of visual reference to death. Instead, Thanos comes across as an over-inflated cousin of Grimace from McDonald’s marketing.  Except Grimace is actually kind of scary.

We’re just a few weeks away from the release of Avengers: Infinity War — its release date was recently bumped up a week to April 27th — and now, Marvel has released new trailer to stir up some more excitement for the upcoming superhero showdown.

Infinity War promises to be one of the biggest films Marvel has ever made, combining almost every single superhero from across the 18-film franchise that began 10 years ago with the release of Iron Man in 2008. As the star-studded trailer shows, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, Chris Evans’ Captain America, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, the rest of the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and pretty much every other ancillary character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe are back.

Marvel Cinematic Universe fans are going to be able to see the next big installment a little sooner than expected. Today, Marvel Studios announced that the worldwide release date of Avengers: Infinity War has been moved to April 27th, a full week in advance of the previous May 4th date.

The announcement came in the form of an exchange on Twitter, with Marvel tweeting a teaser about the film, and star Robert Downey, Jr. responding. The two accounts went back and forth — I’m not going to lie, it was pretty cute — before the new release date was formally revealed.

The latest teaser for Avengers: Infinity War debuted during the Super Bowl tonight, and features all your favorite heroes from the various Marvel properties that have been piling and interlocking for the last 10 years.

Black Panther is there, as is the original set of Avengers, as is the Guardians of the Galaxy crew, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, and Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man. This should be fun and very confusing! They’re all teaming up to face down Thanos, the evil space god last seen in a post-credits scene from 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. He was fully introduced as a primary villain in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, but his status as the big bad guy of the extended universe was hinted at in a post-credits scene for The Avengers in 2012. The showdown will extend into an untitled sequel due out in May 2019.