The first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War has dropped…
…and the first thing I’ve noticed is this:
There are a lot of characters in this movie.
I mean, a lot.
Thankfully, IMDB makes it easy to do such things as catalog every available character, so here goes. This is a pretty comprehensive list of superheroes, supervillains, and their besties to be expected in the new movie – but remember, the MCU makes a habit of surprising us with characters, too, so there are probably more…
- Valkyrie
- Black Widow
- Nebula
- Thor
- Loki
- Scarlet Witch
- Spider-Man
- Star-Lord
- Dr. Strange
- Hulk
- Gamora
- Mantis
- Iron Man
- Hawkeye
- Thanos
- Winter Soldier
- Captain America
- Drax
- Groot
- Rocket Raccoon
- The Collector
- Ant-Man
- Black Panther
- Pepper Potts
- Vision
- Okoye
- Falcon
- War Machine
- Wong
- M’Baku
- Ebony Maw
Phew. Thirty-one significant characters. And I didn’t even get into aliases, alternate identities, etc. Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, or even Steve Rogers galavanting as Nomad. Again, phew.
Imagine how long it takes to have a status meeting of the Avengers. Introductions alone take you until lunch time.
Looking at the previous two Avengers movies, they clock in at 2hr 23m and 2h 21m, so using my amazing math skills, I can quickly calculate their average length to be 2hr 22m. Please, put down your calculators, no need to double check.
That means we have 142 minutes to experience 31 significant characters, or about 4 minutes 35 seconds per character. I may be completely wrong about this, but I’m going to predict that Avengers: Infinity War actually will be a series of 31 vignettes, like a short story collection or a bunch of one-act plays. It’ll be a bit of a departure from fan expectations, but fairly avante-garde (“avant-garde” means “advance guard” so even that makes sense, in terms of defending the world/galaxy/universe). It’ll be like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts with lots of spandex.
I smell Oscars.
The Avengers, the trailer, the image, and all the characters are copyright Marvel and the MCU, of course.