Avengers: Infinity War kicked off with Thanos attacking Thor and Loki's spaceship, allowing the Mad Titan to add the Space Stone to his Infinity Gauntlet alongside the Power Stone.
We never got to see how he managed to acquire the latter, but know he laid waste to Xandar and the Nova Corps (presumably laying the groundwork for the superhero Nova to debut down the line). Now, the character's co-creator, Jim Starlin, has revealed that a lengthy sequence detailing the battle was actually cut from the 2018 release.
"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 was," the writer continued. "They didn’t realize it was going to be quite the hit it was."
Starlin may be exaggerating a tad here, though we know a lot of Thanos content ended up being cut from Avengers: Infinity War. That included his childhood and, based on similar past comments from the Russos, this fight on Xandar. Marvel Studios has never released any of these deleted scenes, though Starlin believes they considered it.
"I wish they would [release a Director's Cut] too," he said. "They had planned on doing some of that for the DVD and then they didn’t."
Marvel Studios typically keeps scrapped scenes like this tightly locked up within their vaults, and we can't help thinking all this could be pieced together to make a Thanos "Special Presentation" on Disney+ somewhere down the line.
Would you have liked to see even more of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War?
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