An essay on Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and the central structural failure that defined the MCU’s transition from peak franchise to declining property. Linked from every Phase One through Phase Four review and from the MCU overview.
The Scale Of The Event
In Avengers: Infinity War, the character Thanos snaps his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet and exterminates half of all living things in the universe. The event is depicted on Earth as the disintegration of approximately three and a half billion people. The depiction is also explicit that the snap affects all life. Half of all animals die. Half of all plants die. Half of all microbes die. Half of every biome on Earth and on every other inhabited world in the universe vanishes at the same time.
I like the Snap itself. Watching named heroes crumble into ash at the end of Infinity War is the boldest move Marvel ever made, and I’d defend the scene as filmmaking. What I can’t forgive is everything that follows.
The script tells me half of all life on Earth just died, and then the films spend five years of story time behaving as if the world lost some friends and a little productivity. That gap is the franchise’s biggest flaw.
The closest historical reference for an event of this magnitude is the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event approximately sixty-six million years ago, in which a combination of asteroid impact and later climate disruption killed approximately seventy-five percent of all species on Earth. The dinosaur extinction is the standard scientific reference point for what happens to a planet when a significant portion of its biosphere dies in a short timeframe.
The consequences of that event included global ecosystem collapse, the extinction of multiple major animal groups, the rearrangement of food chains across millions of years of recovery, and the change in Earth’s climate and chemistry.
The MCU’s Snap is described as affecting fifty percent of all life.
The reality of a fifty percent simultaneous biosphere loss would be civilizationally catastrophic at a scale the MCU doesn’t depict and doesn’t attempt to depict. The films treat the Snap as a dramatic plot point with emotional consequences for specific characters. The actual event the films describe is closer to a planetary near-extinction. The gap between what the script describes and what the script depicts is the central structural failure of the Infinity Saga’s conclusion.
What The Snap Would Have Looked Like
Consider the immediate consequences of half of all humans disintegrating on Earth.
Aviation: at any given moment, between five hundred thousand and one million people are airborne globally on commercial flights, military aircraft, private planes, and helicopters. Half of these people vanish. Half of all pilots vanish. Half of all air traffic controllers vanish.
The result isn’t just thousands of crashes occurring at once across the globe. It’s the immediate destruction of all functional aviation as a system, with secondary consequences including ground impact damage, fires, and infrastructure destruction across the world’s major airports and flight corridors.
Spider-Man: Far From Home glanced at this concept with the casual line about planes falling out of the sky but didn’t pursue it.
Surface transportation: highways are full of cars at any given moment. Half of all drivers vanish from moving vehicles. Trains operating at high speed lose half their crews.
Ships at sea lose half their personnel including ships transporting hazardous materials. The immediate consequence is mass collateral death among the surviving half of humanity from accidents that occur at the same time across the entire globe in the seconds and minutes following the Snap.
Medical care: every surgery in progress at the moment of the Snap loses either the patient or critical surgical staff. Every operating room in every hospital across the planet becomes a death scene.
Patients in intensive care without their attending nurses die. Patients in dialysis die. Patients on life support whose machines lose half their monitoring staff die. The medical infrastructure of the planet collapses in the same instant the Snap occurs and the collateral death toll from medical failure alone is potentially in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Critical infrastructure: nuclear power plants lose half their operators. Chemical plants processing dangerous materials lose half their safety personnel. Water treatment facilities lose half their staff. Electrical grids lose half their maintenance and control personnel. The immediate aftermath of the Snap would include nuclear accidents at facilities operating without sufficient staffing, chemical disasters at production facilities, and cascading failures across the global power grid. The MCU shows none of this.
The biosphere: the Snap kills half of all non-human life. Half of all pollinators vanish. Half of all soil microorganisms vanish. Half of all decomposer organisms vanish.
Half of all phytoplankton in the oceans vanish, with immediate consequences for atmospheric oxygen production. Half of all gut bacteria in humans and animals vanish, with potentially fatal digestive consequences for surviving organisms. The ecological cascade from a fifty percent biosphere loss would dwarf the human civilizational impact and would render most of the surviving Earth uninhabitable within months.
None of this appears in the MCU’s depiction of the Snap. The films show characters disintegrating into ash and focus on how the surviving heroes feel. One shot of an empty cockpit or an abandoned operating table would have done it for me. I’d have settled for anything that told me the writers understood what they’d written. The event they describe would have ended civilization within weeks, and the five years between Infinity War and Endgame would have been a collapse where the films show a world slightly diminished and otherwise fine.
Why Infinity War Is Too Complicated
Infinity War attempts to coordinate the activities of approximately forty named characters across multiple plot threads on multiple planets converging toward a single climactic event. The Russo brothers’ direction handles the logistical challenge of giving each character meaningful screen time better than most filmmakers could have. The result is still structurally overloaded.
The film splits into approximately five major narrative threads: the Vision and Wanda subplot at the start, the Thor space adventure with Rocket and Groot, the Earth-based Avengers in Wakanda with the Vision rescue mission, the Guardians of the Galaxy plus Iron Man plus Spider-Man plus Doctor Strange thread on Titan, and the Thanos pursuit thread that ties through all of them. Each thread has its own plot logic, its own emotional stakes, its own supporting characters, and its own climactic beat.
The film’s two-hour-thirty-minute runtime is insufficient to give any single thread the attention it would have received as a standalone film.
The film asks the audience to track twenty-plus character arcs at once and to remember plot points and character histories from a decade of previous films. It asks the audience to invest emotionally in losses that occur during the climactic Snap without having had time to invest sufficiently in any of the characters being lost. The Snap as filmed is emotionally affecting because the audience brought emotional investment in from previous films. It wouldn’t be emotionally affecting if Infinity War were the only film these characters had appeared in.
The complexity is the film’s primary craft achievement and its primary structural problem.
The Russos delivered a coherent narrative across all of it, and I admire the logistics. I just never got enough time with anybody. Every time the film settled into a thread I cared about, it cut away to another planet. I’d have cut two of the five threads and let the rest breathe, and I think the Snap would have landed harder on its own terms instead of borrowing a decade of goodwill from earlier films.
Why Endgame Is Contrived
Endgame is the most contrived major blockbuster film of the past decade.
The contrivance isn’t accidental. The film is a fan-service delivery system structured around the time-travel premise that allows the surviving Avengers to revisit every previous major MCU film. The structure exists because Marvel Studios determined that the climactic film of the Infinity Saga needed to provide closure for every major character thread the franchise had built across eleven years.
The time-travel rules the film establishes are coherent enough to function as plot machinery. The rules are also clearly retrofitted around the destinations the film wanted to visit. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers return to the 2012 Battle of New York because the film wants to revisit that location with current technology and current cast.
Thor and Rocket return to 2013 Asgard because the film wants to revisit Asgard with current production resources and recent character development. The destinations aren’t selected because the plot requires them.
The destinations are selected because the fan service requires them and the time-travel mechanism is reverse-engineered to justify the visits.
The climactic battle is structured as a fan-service portal sequence in which nearly every surviving character from every previous MCU film appears at the same time on the Wakanda battlefield. The “Avengers, assemble” moment that Steve Rogers delivers is the most quoted moment in MCU history and is also the most pure expression of fan service in the franchise. The audience receives the emotional payoff because the audience has been waiting for the payoff for over a decade.
The structural justification for the moment amounts to: the audience wanted this, therefore the film delivers it. The film sets aside the deeper question of whether what came before justifies the moment in favor of the rush of the delivery.
The Tony Stark sacrifice that resolves the film is the most dramatically affecting beat in the runtime and is also the most directly contrived. Stark’s character arc across the Infinity Saga had been about responsibility, fatherhood, and the cost of his earlier irresponsibility. The arc culminates in a moment in which he sacrifices himself to save the universe while wearing a gauntlet that contains the Infinity Stones. The composition of the moment is intentional. The moment is meant to be the perfect culmination of his arc.
The construction of the moment is also visible if the viewer looks past the emotional affect. The film engineers the situation to allow Stark to make the sacrifice. The sacrifice is the destination the film is heading toward from the opening scene. The writing team constructs the “I’m Iron Man” line that closes the moment to mirror the line that opened the franchise eleven years earlier. The mirror is intentional. It’s also a writer’s construction instead of a character’s choice.
Contrivance isn’t always a failure. Contrivance can produce effective drama if the construction is invisible. Endgame’s contrivance is sometimes invisible (the Tony Stark sacrifice lands for most viewers despite the construction) and sometimes visible (the time-travel destinations feel chosen for nostalgia instead of for plot necessity). The result is a film that succeeded commercially on a scale no film had succeeded at before and that’s aged less well than its initial reception suggested.
The contrivance becomes more visible with each rewatch because the emotional momentum of the first viewing wears off and the construction underneath takes over. The sacrifice moves me anyway, and so does the “I’m Iron Man” line. I dislike the time-travel tour of 2012 New York and 2013 Asgard, because I can see the writers picking destinations off a greatest-hits list and building the rules backward to reach them.
The Five-Year Gap And The Second Catastrophe
Endgame establishes that five years pass between the Snap and the Avengers’ time-travel solution. The film handles this period through brief montage and dialogue instead of through sustained depiction. We see Steve Rogers running a support group for grieving survivors. We see Tony Stark living as a father with Pepper Potts. We see Hawkeye operating as a vigilante killing criminals across the globe. We see Captain Marvel attending to space-scale problems. The five-year period is treated as a downtime montage between the Snap and the Snap’s reversal.
What the five-year period would have looked like is something the MCU systematically refuses to depict. Half the world’s population is gone. Half the world’s economy has collapsed. Half the world’s food production has stopped. Half the world’s infrastructure has degraded. The surviving humans are dealing with mass trauma, mass economic dislocation, mass infrastructure decay, and the gradual realization that their civilization may not be recoverable. The MCU treats this as the backdrop for the Avengers’ emotional regrouping and shows almost nothing of the global situation the script has implied.
The reversal at the end of Endgame creates a second catastrophe that the MCU systematically refuses to engage with. Three and a half billion people return to Earth at once after a five-year absence. Surviving family members or people who moved into vacant property occupy their homes, or the homes have been destroyed entirely. Surviving workers fill their jobs. Their families have moved on, remarried, had new children, mourned them, and built new lives. Their bank accounts may have been closed or distributed to surviving heirs.
Their identities legally may have been declared deceased.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series in 2021 attempted to engage with this aftermath through the Flag-Smashers subplot about displaced returnees. The series was the only MCU project to take the second catastrophe seriously. The reception was mixed because the series tried to address something the films had been refusing to address and couldn’t reconstruct the missing context across one season of television. Most other MCU projects have treated the Blip as either background detail or comedic premise.
Spider-Man: Far From Home includes a sequence in which “blipped” school band members reappear in the middle of a basketball game. The sequence is played for laughs. The depiction is the most explicit example of the MCU treating mass return as comedy instead of as the second catastrophe it would be.
The dinosaur-extinction comparison applies to both events. The Snap itself was a planetary near-extinction event. The Blip is a second planetary disruption event of comparable scale. The second event destabilizes the civilization that survived the first event in different ways. Population doubles instantly with no corresponding doubling of resources, infrastructure, housing, food production, or governmental capacity. Refugee crises at unprecedented scale follow. Conflict over reclaimed property follows. Identity disputes over the legal status of returnees follow. Mass psychological trauma at the individual and collective levels follows. The MCU shows almost none of this.
The Comedy Problem
The most damning element of the MCU’s handling of the Snap and the Blip is the consistent decision to treat both events as comedic material. Spider-Man: Far From Home’s basketball-court reappearance gag established the tone. Later films and series have referenced the Blip as background detail without engaging with its weight. Shang-Chi includes a “Thanos Was Right” coffee mug as visual gag. Hawkeye references a “post-Blip anxiety hotline” as joke. The MCU is treating its own central catastrophic event as material for incidental humor across multiple later projects.
The comedy framing extends the Ragnarok problem identified in the Thor: Ragnarok review. The franchise lost the capacity to take its own mythology seriously. The Snap should have been the franchise’s most weighty single event. Later treatment has reduced it to background atmosphere and incidental jokes. The audience can’t maintain emotional investment in events that the franchise itself doesn’t take seriously. The decorative-comedy approach that began with Ragnarok metastasized through the Infinity Saga conclusion into the Phase Four collapse.
The Blip played as a punchline is the clearest evidence for this trajectory, and it’s the part that makes me angriest. A coffee mug joke about the man who killed half the universe is the kind of gag I’d expect from a parody of these films. Marvel made that joke about its own central tragedy, and I think it tells you how little the studio believed in what it had built.
What The MCU Got Right About The Stones
The Infinity Stones as a unifying concept across Phases One through Three worked.
The Stones provided the franchise with a structural spine that gave individual films purpose beyond their own contained narratives. Each Stone had its own properties, historical context, and narrative function. The Tesseract that appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger turned out to be the Space Stone that drove the plot of multiple later films. The Aether in Thor: The Dark World turned out to be the Reality Stone.
The Mind Stone embedded in Vision’s forehead became the central object of the Avengers: Age of Ultron plot. The chain of connections across the films gave the franchise its sense of accumulating consequence.
The Stones also functioned as a credible cosmic-scale threat.
Six objects of universe-shaping power and a villain determined enough to collect them all gave the franchise a clear trajectory, and the audience could track Thanos closing in across multiple films. This part of the design wins me over completely. It’s the one piece of long-range planning in the MCU I’d hold up as a model, so throwing the Stones away is a baffling decision.
The handling of the Stones during the Snap and the post-Snap recovery is where the franchise lost its grip on what it had built. Thanos destroys the Stones immediately after using them, eliminating the central narrative device the franchise had been building toward for over a decade. Endgame’s time-travel solution involves retrieving the Stones from different points in the past. That functionally retains the Stones as plot devices while having them destroyed in the main timeline. The complexity of the solution undermines the structural elegance of the Stones as concept.
By the end of Endgame, the Stones no longer exist in the MCU’s main timeline. The structural spine that had unified eleven years of filmmaking is removed from future stories.
What replaces the Stones as the franchise’s structural spine in Phase Four is the multiverse, the subject of the companion essay linked below. The multiverse isn’t a structural spine because the multiverse has no edges.
The Stones were finite (six objects, specific powers, specific locations). The multiverse is infinite (uncountable parallel realities, uncountable character variants, uncountable possible plot mechanics). The transition from finite stakes to infinite stakes is the transition from a franchise with consequences to a franchise without them.
The Snap and the Blip were the last sustained engagement the MCU had with finite stakes. Everything after has worked in the multiverse tone that the companion essay addresses.
The Catastrophe The MCU Refused To Show
The Marvel Cinematic Universe spent eleven years building toward an event it then refused to depict. The script describes the Snap as a planetary near-extinction. The film shows the Snap as the disintegration of specific named characters with selective ash effects that don’t depict the actual mass-casualty event the script describes. The films depict the five-year period of catastrophic civilizational decline as a downtime montage. The Blip’s restoration of three and a half billion missing people creates a second catastrophe that later films have treated as comedy.
Every later project has systematically deflated the franchise’s central event instead of honoring it as the planetary catastrophe it represented.
The decision to refuse depiction is the franchise’s clearest sign of its post-Endgame collapse. A franchise that can’t honor its own central event with the seriousness the event requires can’t maintain audience investment in future events.
Captain Marvel’s failure, the Phase Four collapse, and the ongoing Phase Five recovery problems are all downstream consequences of the Infinity Saga’s refusal to depict what it had described. The audience that watched Thanos’s victory in Infinity War expected something proportionate to the scale of the loss.
The audience received a five-year time skip, a time-travel solution, a fan-service portal sequence, and a contrived sacrifice that resolved the narrative without engaging with the consequences of the event it was resolving.
The MCU’s actual achievement in Infinity War and Endgame is more limited than the commercial performance suggested. The films delivered the immediate emotional satisfaction the franchise had spent eleven years setting up. They also avoided the harder work of depicting what their own premise required. The franchise has been paying for this avoidance ever since. The Snap and the Blip should have been the events around which the next decade of MCU storytelling organized itself. Instead they became background detail and occasional comic relief.
The franchise that couldn’t honor its own central catastrophe couldn’t hold its audience’s trust in later stories, and the decline that followed traces straight back to the choices made in 2018 and 2019. I blame Marvel for that, and I blame it more because the Snap proved the studio had the nerve for one devastating scene. It didn’t have the nerve for the aftermath, and I’ve lost patience with a franchise that wants the grief without the consequences.
See also: How The Multiverse Destroyed The MCU, the companion essay on the structural decisions that followed the Infinity Saga’s conclusion.
