“Couldn’t They Accomplish The Same Goal Without Being So Cartoonishly Evil?”
Let’s ruin a movie: Thanos already had everything he needed to succeed ten minutes into Avengers: Infinity War. His goal was to use all of the Infinity Stones to eliminate half of all life in the universe. He had already spent years traveling from planet to planet killing half of the population with his army. By the ten-minute mark of Infinity War, he had acquired the Space Stone, which would allow him to travel to anywhere in the universe instantly, and he had already taken the Power Stone, which meant he could kill an entire planet if he wanted to.
With just those two stones, he could have achieved his goal a million times easier than he could before, and without needing spaceships or armies. He could just teleport, genocide, teleport, genocide.
Walt Disney Pictures
The only reason he went after the other stones was to be a greedy, dramatic prick. But since Marvel had spent 18 movies building up to this, and Robert Downey, Jr.’s solid gold pool house wasn’t gonna pay for itself, they had to stretch the plot out to 2.5 hours plus a 3-hour sequel. The end result was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t exactly practical.
But that’s how big event movies have warped people’s minds on conspiracies. No one is gonna give a shit unless the stakes are ludicrously high and there are tons of A-list celebrities involved. If you were to tell people that there’s a cabal of Satanic child sex traffickers harvesting their victims’ adrenal glands to make psychedelic drugs, you’d get laughed out of that pitch meeting. But if you say Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey are attached to the project, that will get you some press.
