Marvel Studios has been trailblazing new territory for years now. Ever since Nick Fury showed up at the end of Iron Man, they’ve continued to push the envelope of what it means to have a shared universe of films.

With next year’s Avengers: Infinity War and 2019’s Avengers 4, the filmmakers have yet another opportunity to push themselves and the medium forward. It’s not something they take lightly, and from the sound of it, they are taking every opportunity they can to push things even further.

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Speaking with Vanity Fair, Avengers 3 and 4 co-director Joe Russo spoke to that challenge:

“We’ll take blame for the scale, because we were pushing for it. We were pushing to make it bigger, we were pushing it, saying, ‘Look, what you’ve done is an impressive narrative over 10 years, and why shouldn’t this involve every character?’ It should be the culmination, so in some way, we have to touch on everyone in their story, or their theme. It has to be woven in, in some way. You can’t really look back and go, Hey, remember the last time that somebody took 12 franchises and blended them together and told the movie with 60 lead characters? So that’s the challenge, and you have to create your own structure for a story like that. You look at Lord of the Rings, or you can look at [Robert Altman’s] Nashville, but there is no real template for it.”

Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige also had things to say about that challenge:

“How can you have both an ongoing cinematic universe that continues to make films and, at the same time, occasionally bring things to a head? Something you’ve never really seen in superhero films is a conclusion. Is a finale. You’ve seen those in Lord of the Rings films. You’ve seen those in Harry Potter films, in Star Wars. Logan did it a little bit with that character. We thought it would be important to bring the current three-Phase, 22-movie current series to a conclusion. How do I say this? There will be two distinct periods between everything before Avengers 4 and everything after. I know it will not be in ways people are expecting.”

How do you feel about us rapidly approaching the end of a big chapter in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and film history? Let us know your thoughts down below!

Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on May 4, 2018.

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SOURCE: Vanity Fair