‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Directors On Gamora’s Lady Death Parallels

Avengers: Infinity War did not include Thanos‘ motivating factor from comics by the name of Lady Death but his “favorite daughter” Gamora carried a few similarities which were intentionally injected by the film’s directors.

Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War follow. Major spoilers!

Though Gamora is not encouraging Thanos to kill in the same way Lady Death does in the Infinity Gauntlet comics, the Mad Titan’s “favorite daughter” seems to be his motivating factor to balance the entire universe. Anthony Russo, co-director of Avengers: Infinity War, admits Gamora is a live-action representation of Lady Death “in a way,” though she is not meant to fully embrace the role on screen.

“I don’t think we would correlate [Gamora] and young Gamora directly to Lady Death, except for the fact that it is what Thanos cares about,” Anthony Russo said. “We always want to run at the relationships that are growing and developing in the MCU and the fact that Gamora and Nebula were children of Thanos and the fact that they had this very oppressive relationship with him was just so exciting to us. It was such a rich area to mine. Sort of a perverse, abusive father-daughter relationship. It was… we had to run at that as storytellers. It’s just a much more powerful motivation for Thanos and a more powerful relationship for Thanos.”

Of course, Gamora and Lady Death have more than a few significant differences. Chief among them is that Thanos tossed his daughter from a cliff and has never betrayed Lady Death in such a way. However, his vision of young Gamora after snapping his fingers seems to indicate he was acting based on the best interest of people like her who had been in his life as he tried to improve the universe.

Deviating from comics is something the Russo Brothers take pride in, as their job as filmmakers is to surprise audiences (which might be why Adam Warlock is not in Avengers 4).

“Look, our job as we said a million times is to tell the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to do direct adaptations of the comics because we’re comic book fans,” co-director Joe Russo said. “I have no interest as a director in telling a story that’s already been told or in seeing one that’s already been told. If I know all the events story as they’re going to happen then what’s the point of going to the film? We want to keep surprising audiences and continue the story that started with Iron Man One a decade ago.”

Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War are now playing in theaters. Ant-Man and The Wasp is set for release on July 6, 2018. Captain Marvel will follow it on March 6, 2019, with the untitled Avengers 4 set to tie everything about the Marvel Cinematic Universe into a bow on May 3, 2019.

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