MCU NEWS: 20 more movies! End of an era! new images reveal new character designs for Infinity War

There can be little doubt that one of the big movie events of 2018 will be the first half of the Avengers: Infinity War move sag which arrives in May.

After the MCU begin in 2008 with Iron Man, it’s unlikely anyone thought we’d be here nine years later, this deep into arguably cinema’s biggest on screen universe and waiting for what is looking to be a finale of sorts to a journey that has included 18 movies and a heap of TV Shows.

Well, that’s according to producer Kevin Feige.

Infinity War will finally see the arrival of Thanos, played by Josh Brolin, who arrives on earth to claim the Infinity Stones and presumably wreck everything on earth… but standing between him and his villainous goals are The Avengers and The Guardians of The Galaxy plus an assortment of other heroes and characters.

The goal, according to Feige, with Infinity War is to “bring things you’ve never seen in superhero films: a finale. There will be two distinct periods. Everything before Avengers 4 and everything after. I know it will not be in ways people are expecting.”

Does this mean that, as many suspect, this will see the end of Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth, all of whom will have reached the end of their contracts by then?

However, with an almost endless supply of heroes from the comics, it appears that we may only be at the halfway point with a further 20 movies planned in the MCU and that’s not including Black Panther and Ant-Man And The Wasp – both of which are already in production.

However, rather annoyingly, after the events of Thor: Ragnarok, it seems that Thor’s appearance will go back to normal.

The interview with Fiege also has a bunch of new images from a photoshoot of the principal characters from the MCU (below) rocking their new Infinity War costumes, one of which contains an image of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor who is noticeably no longer sporting the eyepatch that he was seen wearing after his battle with Hela… and it seems this is not an accident: “The hammer and cape—which were broken and torn in Ragnarok—may be back for the photo shoot but that doesn’t mean they’ll return in Avengers: Infinity War. As for Thor’s most significant lost accessory, the eye that was plucked out of his head by Cate Blanchett’s Hela, all that remains of that trauma in our gallery is a light scar running down the right side of Hemsworth’s face.”

This is annoying as, firstly, it was a pretty cool look for Thor (perhaps there’s only room for one eye-patched character in the MCU and that is Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury) but also because, as much as we loved Ragnarok, we felt that the events n it never felt like they had the necessary gravity and one of the lasting outcomes of the that movie was Thor’s damaged eye… and now that’s not the case.

Avengers: Infinity War is directed Russo Brothers, and has one of the biggest ensemble ever cast in a movie. Apart from the characters mentioned above, the movie will have Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Spider-Man (Tom Holland, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Star Lord (Chris Pratt), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Hawkeye(Jeremy Renner), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and others.

The movie is scheduled to release in May 2018.

Here’s the photoshoot and covers from the latest issue of Vanity Fair: