While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been borrowing heavily from their long history of comic stories, each has been adapted for the screen in new and different ways. It looks like Avengers: Infinity War will also be very different than its comic counterpart. Mostly, because the film won't be based on Marvel's Infinity War at all, but rather the precursor story, Infinity Gauntlet.
The interesting thing is that according to the sources of LRM who broke this news, the opening of Avengers: Infinity War will actually be quite faithful to the opening of the Marvel comic with the other title. The comic begins with Thanos the Mad Titan, who we have seen here and there since the closing credits of the original Avengers, attempting to woo the personification of Death. Thanos figures the best way to win Death's favor is to bring her souls, so he uses the power of the Infinity Gauntlet to obliterate half of the sentient life in the universe. Did we mention he's insane? We're guessing there might be one change to how this works in the comics. At the beginning of the book, Thanos already has all of the Infinity Stones. He may need to go collect them in the film version.
The primary reason that we're focusing on Infinity Gauntlet and not Infinity War seems to be that the latter story really requires the existence of Adam Warlock, and his evil incarnation Magus, in the MCU, and it doesn't appear that's going to happen. To be fair, Warlock is a big part of Infinity Gauntlet too but there's enough else going on that he can likely be easily covered for. Also, we're assuming they're going with the different title because Infinity War just sounds a whole lot cooler.
On the one hand, this all makes sense. While the movie was being called Infinity War, that comic book story is a sequel to Infinity Gauntlet and in order to tell the Infinity War story, Thanos has to already be defeated. If the plan was to take out Thanos between now and the next Avengers movie in order to actually tell an Infinity War story out of the comics, well, that would be stupid. They've been building up Thanos for years. He needs a proper movie in order to shine and then be taken down by Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
These new details do give us one important piece of information, however. While some rumors have stated that Death, as a character, would not appear in the MCU, and might be replaced by Cate Blanchett's Hela from Thor: Ragnarok, that appears to not be the case. Let the casting rumors commence.
Who would you like to see play Death in Avengers: Infinity War? Leave your casting choices in the comments below.
