AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Will Reportedly Feature 67 Different Characters

Movie Avengers: Infinity War Anthony Russo Joe Russo Marvel about 9 years agoby Ben Pearson

We knew the two-part Avengers: Infinity War movies would be big, but I'm not sure I was fully prepared for them to be quite this big.

The Russo Brothers, who are directing both movies along with this year's Captain America: Civil War, are making the press rounds to promote the latter film, and at Wizard World New Orleans, they dropped a somewhat staggering number of characters that will appear in the new Avengers film(s).

According to ComicBookMovie:

When Anthony Russo mistakenly referred to Hayley Atwell's Marvel character as "Sharon" Carter, his brother Joe came to his defense. "We have so many characters we're dealing with. We're breaking ground on Avengers: Infinity War. We have a board with 67 characters on it. You have to forgive him."

The outlet doesn't indicate that Russo was joking when he mentioned that number, and there's no video of the exchange to look at his body language or hear his tone to tell if he was being hyperbolic. But I fear that he's telling the truth, and 67 characters is an astonishing number. Avengers: Age of Ultron's IMDb page only lists 62 credited characters, and most of those have names like "Sokovian Family Member #3," "Johannesburg Elevator Passenger #1," and "Dr. Cho's Assistant #1." So if the Russos are dealing with 67 recognizable characters, this two-part movie is going to be even more of a storytelling nightmare than I suspected. How can anyone possibly make room for that many characters in two or three hours?

For the sake of argument, let's pretend each Infinity War movie is exactly three hours long, and both films feature all 67 characters. That leaves just over five minutes of screen time per character spread across both films. Now, obviously, people like Thanos and Iron Man are going to have more than five total minutes of screen time in the two movies, and my breakdown scenario isn't ideal for the massive fight scenes which are likely to take up a big portion of these films, but I'm sure you can see the general point I'm getting at — that is a lot of characters to work with, and if people thought Age of Ultron was bursting at the seams, it sounds like we haven't seen anything yet.

Avengers: Infinity War — Part 1 arrives in theaters on May 4, 2018, and Part 2 arrives on May 3, 2019.