“Harry Potter” did it, and so did “Twilight,” “Divergent,” and “The Hunger Games.” And, for a couple of years, it seemed like Hollywood’s reigning franchise was going to take a stab at it, too — splitting the final movie into two parts. When the third and fourth “Avengers” movies were announced in October of 2014, Marvel’s original title treatments hinted at two movies split from one idea, including “Avengers: Infinity War Part I” and “Avengers: Infinity War Part II.” But by the time “Captain America: Civil War” hit theaters in May of 2014, the shared title had been jettisoned.
As screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explain, that seemingly small choice signifies something much bigger: a firm division between two films so distinct that they may as well come from totally different genres.
“I would say it’s more an issue of labeling and branding than what movies we were telling,” McFeely explained. “‘Part I’ and ‘Part II’ implies that you took one big piece of source material, you cut it down the middle, you took a famous book, you cut it in half, you charge people twice. We were clearly not doing that. We’re not taking a story that everyone knows and cutting it in half arbitrarily. We were just trying to tell two big movies that were related in some way.”
Markus cut in: “But are very different.”
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Despite the title change, the screenwriters are adamant that nothing actually changed on the page and they had always intended on crafting a pair of separate stories. “They’re really different,” McFeely said. “So it’s not like we changed course. It’s just the labeling was disingenuous and not doing us any favors. I can’t underline it enough: Literally nothing changed other than the title of the movie.” Yet the inherent connections between the films — both part of a larger story and a series within it — remain intact. “Even though we don’t call the movie ‘Part I’ or the next one ‘Part II,’ like all of our movies, it connects with the movies to come and of course, most specifically with the next Avengers film,” Feige said. So, just how different are these films? “Avengers: Infinity War” Marvel Studios “We sort of treated it like different genres,” McFeely said. “I know Marvel gets a rap for like, ‘all the Marvel movies are the same,’ and I find that BS. ‘Ant-Man’ is not ‘Black Panther.’ It’s just not fair. So it’s more like that, it’s more like the difference between ‘Ant-Man’ and ‘Black Panther.’” It’s a sentiment that Feige also echoed, and while he was characteristically cagey when asked about the specific differences between the films, he could confirm the “different genres” assertion. “Although we haven’t started working on the marketing campaign for ‘Avengers 4’ yet, I’m not sure it will be apparent how much that is the case until people actually see the movie, but that was the idea,” Feige said. “To do two very distinct movies.” Feige added that it has always been Marvel’s intention “to try all different types of genres and all different types of films and I think that’s what we’ve done over the course of these 19 movies leading up to ‘Infinity War,’ 22 movies leading up to ‘Avengers 4’ next year. And certainly [we] want to continue to do that.” Don’t look to “Infinity War” to provide too many hints as to what’s to come in its followup. “[After you see the film] I think you’re probably gonna have fewer ideas about what it’s gonna be than you do now,” Markus said. “I’m gonna put it that way.”