Avengers: Infinity War‘s Ending was Nearly Avengers 4‘s Beginning

Avengers: Infinity War has been out for more than a month, but in the event you’re just returning from hiking in the Himalayas, or a space walk on the International Space Station, we’ll just go ahead and say stop reading if you’ve somehow not seen the film yet.

Okay, so as we all know, Infinity War ended with the most brutal snap in history. Thanos (Josh Brolin) acquired all six Infinity Stones and, as Gamora promised, snapped his fingers and made half the universe’s population disintegrate just like that. That included Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, nearly all of the Guardians of the Galaxy (save Rocket and Nebula) and more, and instantly became one of the most shocking ends in superhero film history, hard stop. Yet as screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have revealed to the New York Times, they weren’t always sure when the snap would take place, in Infinity War or the beginning of Avengers 4. They were always writing a two-part finale that would usher in a new era of Marvel films, and for a while, the snap happened right at the start to Avengers 4.

“But what we realized is, it would feel more like a cliffhanger than we intended,” Markus told the Times. If they’d waited until Avengers 4 to unleash the snap, and do away with a huge portion of Marvel’s superhero roster, Markus said, “it would be a continuation of exactly what you were watching before.” This didn’t work, considering the screenwriters and the studio were adamant about making two really big films, stand-alone stories in their own right, that, when combined, culminated in the epic, final two-part saga that would stand as the culmination of a decade’s worth of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.

Ending Infinity War with the snap and its tragic aftermath allowed the screenwriters to leave viewers in a state of not only shock, but bewilderment about what could possibly happen next.

The first movie, Markus tells the Times, “went all the way to a tragic ending. And then one where mysterious things happen that I can’t tell you about.” The beauty of this, McFeely adds, is “it’s really, I think, difficult to predict where we go next” in Avengers 4.

There’s something more—the screenwriters offered the Times this juicy nugget: Captain America and Black Widow are defending Earth in Infinity War, but in Avengers 4 “they have a much bigger role to play,” Markus says.