War Machine Originally Had A Much Larger Role
"Originally, Rhodey was going to have two different armors in this movie," explains artist Phil Saunders. "And then this ultimately got narrowed down to one armor, so the best elements in both armors were combined into one."
Clearly, War Machine was going to have a bigger role and it seems as if the advanced suit we were originally going to see in this movie may have been saved for Avengers 4 instead. "We really wanted to give him a much more advanced look than what he had had in the previous movie to keep up a little bit with the leap from the Mark 47 to Mark 50 for Iron Man," Saunders adds.
"So I went with a much more sophisticated stealth geometry and breakup of the form language. I also gave him a far more extensive package of weaponry than he had ever previously had."
James Gunn Influenced Groot's Appearance
Sadly, James Gunn is no longer involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe but he was still a big part of proceedings when Avengers: Infinity War was being made.
Joe and Anthony Russo may have been in charge of this story but it turns out that the future Suicide Squad 2 director had a major influence on Groot's appearance, in particular. "James Gunn also wanted to add a bit of an ungroomed attitude where he does not clean up after himself, like trimming his greenery in those awkward spaces and adding a little belly to show him not caring about his appearance," Anthony Francisco reveals, shedding some light on his updated appearance.
Iron Man's New Suit Is "Liquid Metal"
During the course of this adventure, Tony Stark confirms that nanotechnology is what powers his suit. Phil Saunders, however, talks more about that and describes it as being made of "liquid metal."
"This is liquid metal. And when you're dealing with liquid metal and nanotechnology, you're not going to use nanotech to form bolts and screws and rigid sheet metal panels and stuff like that," he explains. "It just doesn't make any sense. So the first thinking we were thinking about was 'Okay, how do we maintain something that's still grounded as an iron man suit, but it makes sense in that it's liquid metal?'"
"I spend a lot of time thinking about and illustrating how the suit would form--wanting to get a sense that even though it's liquid metal, it's not one large, cohesive liquid metal. It's actually forming all the anatomical hairs underneath. there's sort of a neurological layer and a circulatory-system layer that gets formed, and then a layer of musculature."