Avengers: Endgame VFX Boss Details Balancing Two Versions of Thanos

As if just one Thanos (Josh Brolin) wasn’t enough in Avengers: Infinity War, the magic of time-travel introduced in Avengers: Endgame allowed for two versions of the Mad Titan to show up in one movie. To start the film off, present-day Thanos is ultimately decapitated by Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as payback for “The Snap.” As Avengers: Endgame visual effects boss Dan DeLeeuw explains to us, Thanos was very much at peace with himself when the Avengers visited his farm and left him without a head.

Despite technically being two characters, any and all visual effects relating to Thanos in Endgame came from the Mad Titan’s model from Infinity War.

“He has multiple outfits, so you have got kind of what was a philosopher Thanos, the one that became the elevated human being after he started collecting the stones and wasn’t the warlord,” DeLeeuw tells ComicBook.com. “And then at the end of the film, by using the stones, he gets damaged. The stones take their toll on his body.”

As you’ll know by now, The Snap in Infinity War wasn’t the only one. Off-screen on his personal farm planet, the baddie went through another snap, something that ended of destroying the stones and much of his own physique.

“…but then off-camera, he’s used the Gauntlet again to destroy the stones,” continues DeLeeuw. “So we had to go back and damage it even further, what happened off-camera when he used the Gauntlet twice. From there, you had the Thanos from the beginning of the movie that was, his arm was shriveled, and that kind of set the stage for what was going to happen to the Hulk and Tony later on.”

Matt Aitken, the VFX supervisor from Weta Digital — the vendor charged with building the new version of Thanos — expressed a similar sentiment to us earlier this year, saying “We found that there was some more complexity that we could add to his rig there to get more nuances of performance. And we also did some work adding subtle detail to his overall facial performance to make it more complex and natural, and hopefully as a result more believable.”

Avengers: Endgame is now available digitally ahead of a home media release August 13th.

Other upcoming Marvel Studios projects include Black Widow on May 1, 2020, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in fall 2020, The Eternals on November 6, 2020, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on February 12, 2021, WandaVision in spring 2021, Loki in spring 2021, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on May 7, 2021, What If? In summer 2021, Hawkeye in fall 2021, and Thor: Love and Thunder on November 5, 2021.