Thanos could have narrated Avengers: Infinity War, and we’re glad he didn’t

An earlier version of Avengers: Infinity War could have shown more of the Black Order and one very surprising narrator. Safe to say, we like the final version.

This week is going to be an exciting one for Marvel fans. The new trailer for Captain Marvel will air tonight during Monday Night Football. We also may get the Avengers 4 trailer this week, with strong rumors of it dropping this Wednesday. With all the buzz over these upcoming movies, it’s surprising that we’re still learning new information about Avengers: Infinity War.

The Russo brothers recently did a Q&A in connection with a Collider screening of the film. During the interview, the two discussed a variety of topics but didn’t give any spoilers away for Avengers 4. They did, however, reveal that they had three different drafts for Infinity War.

Anthony Russo had this to say about these earlier drafts.

"We did three drafts of this that were all radically different. One draft involved Thanos as the narrator of the film. It was non-linear in structure, it had backstories for the Black Order, and they were all introduced in very cool sequences. But it ended up being a 250-page script and we thought, ‘Alright, we can’t fit all of this storytelling.’"

The version of the film with Thanos as the narrator sounds like it would have been quite different than the version fans ended up seeing. To be honest, Thanos narrating doesn’t sound like it would have been the best choice. The film is already heavily Thanos focused.

While some may have enjoyed the amount of Thanos scenes in Infinity War, it took away precious screen time for our beloved heroes. Thus if more screen time had also been given to introducing the Black Order, we may have lost out on pertinent scenes. (Look, I’m still really bitter about how Captain America is hardly in Infinity War AT ALL.)

Also, while many people love Thanos, he murdered his daughter, and he deserves more criticism than he gets. Making him even more of the center of the story doesn’t seem like the right move. A nonlinear structure would also have been pretty confusing, so we think the Russo brothers made the right choice in scrapping that idea.

Anthony Russo did explain that even though they didn’t use that large draft completely, it was still useful for getting to know the characters and story.

"A lot of times when you work on a movie of this scale and you end up with a 250-page draft, it’s the bible for the movie. You gain a lot of information. You write characters out in a way that you start to understand what it is they want. I think writing out Thanos’ narration gave us insight into who he was as a character and what we wanted him to do in this film."

What do you think? Would you have liked to have seen a Thanos narration version of Infinity War instead? Let us know in the comments!