Avengers: Infinity War Cut A 45-Minute Sequence Showing How Thanos Got The Power Stone
"Avengers: Infinity War" is arguably the biggest achievement of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is a movie that brings together a decade's worth of plots and characters in an epic conclusion to the saga that perhaps should have been the end of the MCU for a while. Despite all the great character meetings, the big reveals, the emotional beats, and the cool fights, the film feels incomplete. This is mostly because "Infinity War" is half a story, with "Endgame" providing an actual conclusion to the storyline — and some character deaths too.
It turns out, even if these movies are already rather long, we almost got an even longer movie that offered some insight to unanswered questions from the movie, like how the hell Thanos got the power stone before the start of "Infinity War."
Speaking with Near Mint Condition, comics legend and Thanos creator Jim Starlin revealed there is a deleted scene that would have shown Thanos causing even more mayhem.
"About a month before the movie came out, I got an email or something from Joe [Russo] saying, 'the 45 minutes of Thanos that we had at the beginning of 'Infinity War,' we had it cut.' There was a whole sequence of him getting the first gem and they had to cut that out. They shot it, but they never wanted to spend the money on the effects and they didn't want the movie to be as long as the second one ['Endgame'] was. They didn't realize it was going to be quite the hit it was."
Let there be carnage
When we first see Thanos in "Infinity War," he has just destroyed the Asgardian ship carrying the last remaining survivors of the planet's destruction from "Thor: Ragnarok" as he searched for the Space Stone — which Loki had stolen from Odin's vault. In one impactful opening scene, the Mad Titan easily overpowers Thor and even defeats Hulk in a fistfight thanks to the Power Stone.
We don't see how Thanos obtained the Power Stone, which was last seen on Xandar at the end of the first "Guardians of the Galaxy," but it seems based on Jim Starlin's comments that we could have seen a rather lengthy and epic battle wherein Thanos would get the stone (presumably after destroying much of the planet).
This is not the first time we hear of deleted scenes centered around Thanos. "Infinity War" screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely originally envisioned the film as partly a Thanos origin story, and several scenes with flashbacks to Thanos' youth were written before getting ultimately cut.
A movie framed around the villain, perhaps one with Thanos narrating the story a la "GoodFellas" could be interesting, sure, but this is already one mighty long film, and to add another 45 minutes to what is essentially just another one of five McGuffins would have been excessive.