'Avengers: Infinity War' Directors Explain How They Used Misdirection to Fool Audiences

Avengers: Infinity War has left quite an impact on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with fans anxiously wondering what will come next. And according to the film's directors, that involved a little trickery.

Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War below!

In a recent interview with Variety, Infinity War co-director Joe Russo was asked about the end result of the film, and the ways that the film's various trailers misled viewers. While the marketing campaign occasionally hinted at certain original Avengers meeting their demise, or various sorts of interactions taking place, the Russos apparently wanted fans to not fully have a grasp on what to expect.

"We do our best work when we follow our instincts and tell the story we want to tell," Russo explained. "We've had one or two experiences early in our careers where we didn't do that and we learned a very hard lesson: When you try to predict what an audience wants, you're going to make mush. When you commit to the story you want to tell, it tends to have a much more resonant impact on the audience … The audience can tell you they love chocolate ice cream, but if you give it to them every day, they're going to get sick of it real fast. You've got to stay ahead of them."

As fans who have seen Infinity War know, the film sort of went out of its way to defy expectations, both in the presentations of certain moments and in which characters ultimately ended up biting the dust (pun intended). And as Anthony Russo put it, the execution of that had to do with the Russo Brothers' personal connection to the source material, and their desire to give fans something new.

"Joe and I, we are huge fans of what these movies are." Anthony Russo told ComicBook.com last week. "We are huge fans of the source material that all these movies come from. So the most important thing for us as fans is we want to be told a new story. We don't want to see what we expect. We want to come into a narrative, whether it be a comic book or a movie, and experience an expression of the characters that we haven't seen before. We want to see the characters taken to places we haven't seen them before. We want to see slightly different colors filtered through the auteur vision of whatever artist is presenting that."

"So that's what we try to do as filmmakers." Anthony Russo continued. "We try to chase that same experience that we're looking for. So hopefully this movie, while it has many of the characters that they've come to grow and love, it will be a fresh expression of those characters, and one they weren't quite predicting."

Did Avengers: Infinity War surprise you? Are you mad that certain scenes weren't in the film? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Avengers: Infinity War is in theaters now.