Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War sees Thanos vying to obtain all six Infinity Stones in order to fulfill his goal of killing off half the universe, but for as grand as that plot may sound, watching the Mad Titan collect glowing rocks one right after another doesn’t necessarily translate to an exciting movie. That was the challenge presented to Infinity War writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who also wrote all three Captain America films and Thor: The Dark World.

During IGN’s visit to the set of Infinity War with a small group of press, Markus and McFeely spoke about how they plan on tackling that problem.

“We’re big structure guys. So if you go back and look at Winter Soldier and Civil War particularly, they are, whether you like the movies are not, they’re pretty well structured,” Markus said. “We had to do the same thing here and yet we had six MacGuffins – it can be relentless if you do this right. Which means, every time you collect [an Infinity Stone] – I don’t mean to get into the screenwriting weeds – but every time you collect one, it can’t just be a check mark. It has to do something characterful. It’s got to move the plot forward but it also has to stakes and cost for literal characters at the time, so that it’s not just a shopping spree. And I think we’ve done that and boy, we’re going to wrench some emotion out of each and every one of those moments that we can.”

In other words, whenever Thanos adds another stone to his gauntlet, you can expect it to mean dire consequences for the heroes and be a major turning point in the film. Some of the Infinity Stones are very personal to some characters -- the Time Stone hangs around the neck of Doctor Strange inside the Eye of Agamotto, and the Mind Stone embedded in Vision’s forehead literally gives him life -- and Thanos will need to go right through them to get what he wants. If you need a recap of where the other stones are, the purple Power Stone resides with the Nova Corps, the red Reality Stone with the Collector on Knowhere, the blue Space Stone/Tesseract with Loki on the Asgardian ark, and the orange Soul Stone has yet to be revealed.