For a long time, most of us assumed that Avengers: Infinity War would be based mostly on the Infinity Gauntlet comic book. However, the reveal that the Black Order will appear (as four more of Thanos' children) points to Marvel Studios taking cues from recent event series Infinity from Jonathan Hickman.
Asked during an interview at Comic-Con last night about the decision to introduce the Black Order, the movie's co-director Joe Russo explained why he and brother Anthony decided to throw the villains into the mix. As expected, it sounds like they'll serve as henchmen for Earth's Mightiest Heroes to battle.
"We get inspired by a lot of different material when we’re working on the movie. We pulled from both Infinity runs for this, and look, there are a scary bunch of characters who I happen to think, when I read the Infinity run, were super cool. And when I got the opportunity to make this movie, I said I have to do the Black Order. You know, we have so many characters and Thanos needs to be teased out. You can’t have the characters challenging him every step of the way. There has to be characters that they have to go through to get to him. The Black Order is the perfect cast of characters to do that with."
In the comic books, Black Dwarf, Corvus Glaive, Ebony Maw, and Proxima Midnight are joined by Supergiant but he was nowhere to be seen when Marvel unveiled those four statues. Asked why that is, Russo explained the decision to leave him on the shelf and confirmed that the members of the Black Order will have different powers to fit the storyline and make them even cooler than expected.
"We are dealing with so many characters that we made some choices along the way. Consolidation seemed like a smart thing to my brother and I because they were starting to overlap each other. And frankly, when you see the movie you’ll understand, it services the storytelling. The power meld in and frankly, we’re altering their powers to things that I felt were in better service of our storytelling. But also things that I think are cooler and things that I want to see, and again, as a comic book fan, as I read a book, I have my own ideas about what I would do with those characters, the same way that a writer would, the way any writer would when he takes on Spider-Man or Captain America. Everyone brings their own spin to it. So we brought our own spin to the Black Order."
What do you guys think of these comments? It certainly sounds like we can expect big things from the children of Thanos when they appear in Infinity War but are you ok with changes being made?