One Piece Spark

So when Avengers: Infinity War was announced, while most people were wondering which Marvel characters would die at the hand of supervillain Thanos, I was saving all my speculation for the billing block. The movie is an unprecedented team-up of characters that far outstrips even the last two Avengers casts, and it has to construct a plausible credit order for dozens of actors who have become big stars in their own franchises, and aren’t used to being 16th billed. How would Marvel manage it? The answer is deliciously complicated. Let’s do a deep dive into the billing block at the bottom of that Infinity War poster, which has the tricky business of sorting 27 stars and leaving a few notable Marvel heroes out entirely. The first five names in the billing block are the core, OG Avengers: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson. Even within that tried-and-true group of superheroes, though, there are some interesting credit placements. For examp...

If you’re merely a casual fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the arrival of the first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War might not seem like a huge deal: After all, pretty much every Marvel movie now feels like an Avengers movie, with the team’s various heroes playing crucial supporting roles in such recent hits as Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok. What began as a winking, post-credits tease in 2008’s Iron Man “I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger initiative” has become the series’ hours-long, deeply threaded mega-narrative, full of Infinity Stones and intra-squad squabbling, and populated by dozens of characters. At this point, even the Watcher needs Wikipedia to keep up. But Infinity War is the MCU’s biggest gambit yet (and, strictly speaking, its only one), the first part of a reckoning/realignment that will eventually lead to Marvel’s much-discussed “Phase 4,” emphasizing a different squad of heroes and villains. With some of the series...