Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have proven themselves to be amongst the best filmmakers the MCU has to offer with their past two efforts for the franchise: namely, 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. The movies were distinct from others in the series because, among other things, they mostly steered away from the usual lighter-hearted tone of the MCU.
Now they’re helming a fully-fledged Avengers flick in the shape of Infinity War and as such, the duo have altered the tone somewhat. Joe’s promised that the upcoming event movie will actually be a lot funnier than their previous Marvel productions, just as is appropriate because it’s not part of the Captain America series.
“I think that tone is an under-appreciated aspect of filmmaking. In fact, one of the most critical aspects is managing tone, and this film in particular, when egos like this clash between these superheroes there’s bound to be humor. A lot of the characters in this universe diffuse tension with humor, so we knew the movie was going to be very funny. It’s very different than Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War in that regard because the tone of Cap movies is a little bit more serious. Cap is a little more straight-laced and intense, and the world he was in in both of those movies required he behave that way.”
Russo has a point there. The Winter Soldier, in particular, cultivated a very different, much more serious and mature, tone from its predecessor, 2011’s The First Avenger, which was more of an old-fashioned adventure movie. Civil War, meanwhile, was in some ways lighter due to the presence of “comic relief” characters like Spider-Man and Ant-Man, but the subject matter of the Avengers splitting in two mostly suppressed the usual team-up yucks.
In Infinity War, however, the film will follow in the tonal footsteps of Joss Whedon’s two previous quip-happy Avengers movies a bit more. Despite the major threat of Thanos’ quest to wipe out half the universe, there’s always going to be a lot of laughs when the likes of Iron Man, Star-Lord, Thor and many, many others trade banter. In fact, Russo revealed that there was so much great interplay from the actors that it proved difficult to edit down.
“And in this film, you’ve got a lot of ya know really unique personalities clashing so we knew we were going to lean into the humor. The way that we balance it in the script phase and on set with the actors is we do a lot of improvisation.
We have a lot of very funny people on the set, so typically we wait for the first take or two we’ll have them stick to script and then we let them go off script and probably shoot five or six more takes off script, and then you get in the edit room with all that footage and you spend hours and hours combing through it until you find the right combination that balances the tone and gets the humor across but keeps the stakes moving forward.”
We’ve already seen a selection of comedic moments between the heroes thanks to the trailers and clips released so far. Some highlights include Spider-Man and Doctor Strange “using their made-up names” and Star-Lord feeling threatened by Thor‘s superior muscles. And in just over a week, we’ll get to see what other laughs Avengers: Infinity War contains when it hits theaters on April 27th.