Marvel Studios Producer Reveals Why ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Was the Right Time for Iron Man’s Bleeding Edge Armor

Over the course of eight movies throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, fans have watched Tony Stark make more and more impressive updates to his Iron Man armor. But all of them were blown out of the water by the nanotech-enhanced Bleeding Edge design from Avengers: Infinity War.

The Bleeding Edge armor incorporates some of the best parts of the Extremis concepts with the sleek design from the comics, giving Stark an unprecedented amount of power and abilities that we hadn’t seen in the Iron Man armors before.

In the newly released book The Art of Avengers: Infinity War — which you can get right here — Marvel Studios EVP of Production Victoria Alonso explained why this movie was the right time to bring out that specific armor.

“The Bleeding Edge was something that we talked about for a long time,” Alonso said. “We wanted to have something that was tighter to the body, that he could command on the go, that didn’t require him to suite up elsewhere. He could do it just by tapping the RT, and create different weapons that came from the suit itself so he could defend himself — because don’t forget, he’s never had to face someone like Thanos.”

Iron Man was able to go toe-to-toe against Thanos, but only for a few moments. The Mad Titan outmatched Stark when they went blow for blow, and with good reason. Thanos is basically the greatest villain the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever seen.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige spoke about Thanos’ role in the MCU, playing up his importance to the franchise.

“Thanos has been lurking in the shadows with a desire to obtain these Infinity Stones, which has played a big part in our other films,” Feige said in Marvel Studios: The First Ten Years. “We’ve introduced the Tesseract, revealed to be the Space Stone; the Mind Stone, which came out of Loki’s scepter and then went into Vision’s forehead; and the Time Stone: the Eye of Agamotto that Doctor Strange wears is an Infinity Stone itself! And of course the Guardians dealt with the Power Stone.”

“So these storytelling devices that we’ve seeded into every film will continue to play a part and come together,” Feige continued. “We’ve been teasing this for six years. That’s a long time to tease something cinematically before paying it off. Thanos has to be the greatest villain in our movies.”

We’ll see if Tony Stark gets an even greater upgrade when Avengers 4 premieres in theaters on May 3, 2019.