5 things standing between Avengers: Infinity War and total failure

Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney

The stakes need to be higher than ever

Okay, maybe calling for higher stakes is the wrong way to put it. After all, Thanos is threatening to destroy or subjugate all of existence. But we’ve already seen that level of potential carnage in the second Guardians of the Galaxy. It seemed to work out fine for the universe then.

The problem with raising the stakes in the MCU is not that they need to be bigger, in the sense of moving from saving a city to a country to the world to the galaxy. It’s that no matter how much is at stake, we as an audience can feel relatively comfortable that there’s no chance of the city/country/world/galaxy being destroyed in the first place. That’s just how these movies work.

And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing; at their core, superhero films are about hope, inspiration, overcoming great difficulties and some sweet action sequences. The answer to the question of how to make the conflict mean something isn’t necessarily “let the bad guys win a few.” Instead, there need to be thematic and character-based questions up in the air. Dreams, beliefs, and relationships are much more fragile than the fabric of all of existence, after all.

But with so many characters in play, how can Infinity War find the time to dig into those important elements? It seems likely that most of the movie’s runtime will have to be devoted to the simple logistics of dealing with so many moving parts.

That being said, given that Infinity War is the first of a two-part experience and also the end of Phase 3, it’s entirely possible that the first movie will end with something we’ve never seen before: the villain actually winning.