A large part of it comes from experience: Markus and McFeely are the closest thing that Marvel Studios has to “house writers,” having penned all three Captain America movies, Thor: The Dark World (with Stephen Yost) and now Avengers: Infinity War and next year’s Untitled Avengers (a.k.a. Avengers 4). On both new Avengers movies and the last two Captain America adventures, they’ve worked with directors Anthony and Joe Russo, with Marvel head Kevin Feige saying about the quartet, “The four of them together have an understanding of our cinematic sandbox more than anybody else.” Den of Geek: You guys elegantly wove together a dozen or 15 characters in Civil War. Was that a good test ground to now do three times as many characters in these films? Christopher Markus: It taught us some lessons about bringing people in when they’re needed. You don’t have to do a roll call at the beginning of the movie. Like, Hawkeye comes in two thirds of the way through the movie when he is needed. That was how we stayed sane throughout this. Speaking of Hawkeye… Stephen McFeely: Where the hell’s Hawkeye? McFeely: As Chris was saying, one of the ways we could handle this is because we said to ourselves, “All right, we’ve got two movies to work with.” They’re clearly related, but they’re very distinct. Certain characters will carry over, and that has to be okay. Judge us in May of ’19, whether or not that character had a full arc, don’t judge us hopefully just on one movie. My assumption is that there will be some people who go, “Oh, my favorite character only got a little bit of screen time in the first movie.” Odds are, they’ll have a lot more in the second one. And that was what was best for their story.” So is that the case with Hawkeye? McFeely: Yes. Markus: Yep. Markus: Well really, creatively, nothing changed. From the get-go, Kevin and everybody wanted the two movies to be two movies. For it not to be like hitting pause and saying, “See you next summer!” And then it just starts up again. How can you have two whole movie-going experiences that are still clearly connected, clearly part of the same larger story, but feel like two separate works of creativity? It came to a point where we had developed the stories for that, and we were doing the scripts for that, and we were prepping it, and they really were becoming two distinct things. It seemed to be doing a disservice to both of them to just go, “Infinity 1, Infinity 2,” so they both seem like half a movie, as opposed to two complete ones. Both Kevin Feige and the Russos have said that the title could potentially be seen as a spoiler. McFeely: Well, it’ll make you think…if I told you the title right now, it would make you look differently at this movie. There’s no fun to that, and that’s bad for us. McFeely: For sure. Again, there are 23 characters, and they don’t all have an equal amount of screen time, right? We did our best to give them arcs to some degree, but some will have much bigger arcs in the next movie. And some with big arcs here will have smaller arcs in the next movie. That’s just sort of the balance. Was it challenging to write for characters you haven’t touched on before, like Doctor Strange or the Guardians? I think James Gunn said he helped out a bit with the Guardians. McFeely: Some great, funny pieces. Markus: There is a hysterical chunk that is him. Markus: It’s just a breath of fresh air. We’ve been mining the Cap zone for three movies, and to finally get some characters who don’t take anything particularly seriously is fun to play with, and also fun to then mash them up against the people who take everything seriously. McFeely: It’s Civil War that sort of taught us that we can, hopefully if we can buckle down, we can sort of handle everybody’s character and give them a voice that’s true to what’s come before, but slots into the tone and stakes of our structure. McFeely: For sure. The only things that Marvel said to us when we started were, Thanos, Infinity Stones, and be bold. Reach for an epic story. People don’t expect “My Dinner with Thanos.” They expect a really big canvas, so let’s try to tell a story that requires a big canvas. Markus: Two of the watch phrases at Marvel are “Spend it all now,” just use all your good ideas now because you’ll have more, and “Write yourself into a corner.” And we did both of those. Then it was like, “Okay, we’ve got to get out of the corner. We’ve used up all our ideas, so what do we do now?” (laughs) McFeely: No. But that’s a group conversation. So we would say, “Listen, the story that it looks like we’re telling, maybe this sacrifice needs to be made.” Or this person needs to say goodbye in a certain way, and then that becomes a group conversation. But as part of the epic storytelling and the big ambition, it’s an end chapter, it’s not a chapter. So if someone’s arc comes to a close here in a really satisfying way, why would we not do that? Markus: If the story doesn’t demand it, don’t do it, and if the story demands it, don’t hold back. Are you finished or are you on call for potential Avengers 4 reshoots? Markus: No, we’ll be tinkering with Avengers 4 ’til this time next year. The vast majority of it is in the can, but… Different in tone, or…? McFeely: Genre. So what would be the genre, if you could say? McFeely: We can’t really say. The Russo brothers talk about a 90s heist movie, like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Out of Sight. And I guess by that they mean that one guy is, because of his intention and the crimes he’s committing, forcing other people to come in and maybe they want to steal the diamonds for themselves, or whatever. And so everyone is reacting to Thanos, and that’s sort of the only way this could work. He’s the hub of the wheel, and everyone else is a spoke. Avengers: Infinity War is in theaters now.
