Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame nearly featured a teenaged Thanos at one point in the film’s development.
Of course, one of the biggest things that Infinity War and Endgame introduced was the full-fledged version of Josh Brolin’s Thanos – and as new concept has revealed, Thanos’ story in Avengers 3 & 4 was a lot more intricate and extensive in earlier versions of both films.
Case in point: take a look at concept art of what a younger Thanos would’ve looked like in Avengers: Infinity War!
This revelation comes from Marvel Studios Vice President of Development and Creative Director Ryan Meinerding via the newly released book Art of Avengers: Endgame. The tome contains a slew of fun facts and behind-the-scenes information about the record-breaking film, its predecessor Avengers: Infinity War and several other MCU projects.
Included in the book’s “Unused Concepts” is information about a scrapped storyline from Infinity War that showed the Mad Titan at various ages. It began with an infant Thanos, progressing through his teenage years, and Meinerdling shared photos of 13-year-old, 17-year-old and 22-year-old Thanos on Instagram.
These different conceptions of The Mad Titan would’ve gone hand-in-hand with Infinity War and/or Endgame‘s more extensive backstory for Thanos and Titan, which was originally part of the narrative. In fact, the sequence with that would’ve featured the “Young Thanos” seen above was also going to feature The Mad Titan’s entire family, and detail what happened to/between them when Titan finally fell. If you haven’t checked out the Thanos family concept art yet, make that your next stop.
Obviously, the visual element of this backstory did not make it into the final cut of the film. Instead, Thanos’ motive was described in several lines to characters like Gamora and the group of heroes who met him on Titan. However, while fans were still able to understand his motives, it seems they were robbed of a key opportunity to see Thanos at his most vulnerable.
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