‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Directors Reveal Real Reason Beta Ray Bill Wasn’t in Film

Avengers: Infinity War featured the debut of Stormbreaker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but what about Stormbreaker’s original owner from the comics, Beta Ray Bill?

During a Q&A following a screening a screening of Avengers: Infinity War, directors Joe and Anthony Russo discussed why Beta Ray Bill was left out of the movie.

“So many characters,” Joe Russo said. “Beta Ray Bill has been discussed many times. He was one of my favorite characters as a kid, but it’s just, really, functionally, where does he fit? We’ve got a lot of characters that you care about that we’re trying to tell the stories about, a long arcing narrative about, and when new characters come into the world they have to have an effect on the story otherwise there’s no value in introducing them and we just didn’t have the space in a film like this to do that.”

Anthony Russo added, “To be honest with you when we were starting this we didn’t know if we could pull off the number of characters that we ended up pulling off because there’s no model for a movie with this many characters. There’s nothing you can look back, there’s no structure that you can look to and lean on that says, ‘Oh, here’s how a narrative can be built with this number of characters.’ The whole process was us just sort of figuring out how do you take even the number of character we had and sort of pay them off all properly in the story.”

Marvel Comics fans may have noticed that the Stormbreaker created in Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t actually look like Beta Ray Bill’s hammer. Instead, it more closely resembles the version of Mjolnir from the Ultimate Marvel Universe. In the book The Art of Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel Studios artist Ryan Meinerding revealed why that is.

“I always felt that Beta Ray Bill’s weapon from the comics – Stormbreaker – was a little too similar to Mjolnir,” Meinerding says. “So I was looking to more of the Mjolnir from The Ultimates, where it has more corners and edges, and feels more like a heavy, solid thing as opposed to another Mjolnir-sized weapon–almost that it feels unbalanced. It’s almost too powerful. It really takes someone incredibly powerful just to pick it up because it’s such an unbalanced weapon.”

Do you wish Beta Ray Bill had made it into Avengers: Infinity War? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Avengers: Infinity War is now available on home media.

Upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019; Avengers 4 on May 3, 2019; Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th, 2019.