Black Widow

With the movie now on home video, we can begin to focus on what the post-‘Infinity War’ world holds for the Avengers. It’s a future that Marvel is studiously avoiding showing us ahead of next spring’s ‘Avengers 4’, with ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp‘ taking place at roughly the same time as ‘Infinity War‘ and the upcoming events of ‘Captain Marvel’ taking place in the 1990s.

But while Marvel may be saving the big reveal (so to speak) for next year, we’re still getting the occasional hint here and there of what to expect. Because the thing about the post-Snap status quo isn’t just how the world changed (beyond the obvious). It’s how it changes the characters we’ve spent a decade following. That’s really the whole point. After all, it’s surely not an accident that many of the heroes who died at the end of the film were precisely the ones whose loss would hit the survivors hardest.

Speaking to Wired, co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo offered a rundown of the characters that make up the jam-packed cast of ‘Infinity War’, explaining how they interpret the heroes and what makes them so compelling. In the course of that discussion, they also offered a hint of what the Snap means for Captain America and Black Widow:

“In ‘Winter Soldier’, what we found so compelling about pairing [Black Widow] up with Captain America was that he is a sort of paragon of morality and she is a paragon of gray. But when they’ve grown together and I think when you find them in this movie and they’ve been the Secret Avengers for two years because they’re being hunted by Ross and the government, they’re like a tight-knit family now – her, Sam Wilson, and Steve Rogers.”

 

“It’s hardened them in a way. You can’t go on the run without it affecting you emotionally, so I think all of those characters – specifically the ones who survived ‘Infinity War’, Cap and Natasha – you will see them with a much harder edge.”

Directed by the Russo brothers from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, ‘Avengers 4’ continues the story that began in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ earlier this year. The film, which counts Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Holland, Karen Gillan, Paul Rudd, Chadwick Boseman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olson, Sebastian Stan, and three gentlemen named “Chris” among its gargantuan cast will arrive in theaters on May 3, 2019.