MCU: 10 Things You Might Not Know About AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Geek Dave speaks Groot.

1. The 19th chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War, premiered in April 2018 and went on to become the highest-grossing movie of the year, taking $2.048 billion globally. But that's not the only box office record Infinity War claimed, it also scored the highest opening weekend and single weekend gross (with $640.5 million), the highest 3D opening weekend gross (with $366 million), it also became the highest-grossing superhero movie ever, and the fastest film to gross $1 billion (which it did in 11 days).

Every single one of the records it held (apart from being the biggest movie of 2018) was beaten one year later. By Avengers: Endgame.

2. It's always easy to spot the Stan Lee cameo, and here he plays Peter Parker's school bus driver, but there are a couple of other cameos in Infinity War that you might not have been aware of.

Screenwriter Stephen McFeely cameos as an aide next to Secretary Ross (William Hurt), and Kenneth Branagh, the director of Thor, voices an Asgardian distress caller at the beginning of the movie issuing the transmission that the Asgardian ship was being attacked. Branagh has the honour of delivering the first spoken line of the entire film.

3. Talking of cameos, David Cross was invited to make a cameo appearance as Tobias Fünke, his character from the television sitcom Arrested Development, which Infinity War directors the Russo brothers had previously worked on. A scheduling conflict meant Cross couldn't take part in the filming but his character still appears in the film in his Blue Man look. You can see him as a specimen in the Collector's collection, played by an uncredited extra.

4. There were plans for Howard the Duck to appear in for Avengers: Infinity War, as Joe Russo explained...

"Yeah, it was [Peter] Quill trying to track down some information from Howard the Duck on some outlier planet and interrupting him during a poker game."

The scene never ended up being shot but the idea was to have Howard the Duck playing poker with Ken Jeong, he of The Hangover and Community fame, which the Russo's also directed episodes of. The do like to look after their own, don't they?

5. When it came to dubbing Avengers: Infinity War for foreign language territories, Tony Stark's insult to Thano's henchman Ebony Maw, calling him "Squidward", had to be changed to "Voldemort" as the SpongeBob SquarePants character's name in French is simply "Carlo", which was deemed far too ordinary for audiences to get the joke. The same replaced insult appeared on the German dub where Squidward is called "Thaddäus".

6. As Avengers: Infinity War began filming two weeks after Black Panther wrapped, no one involved had seen the previous MCU film. The creative team learned about the Wakanda battle chants from the cast of Black Panther themselves, it wasn’t featured in the original script but was overheard by the Russo brothers when Winston Duke, who reprised his role of M'Baku, the leader of Wakanda's mountain tribe the Jabari, was trying to get all the actors warmed up by doing war chants off camera. After enquiring about it, they added the chant to the script.

7. Although many characters reprised their roles from previous MCU films, someone who declined the chance was Hugo Weaving. Weaving had already expressed reluctance to return as the character of Johann Schmidt/Red Skull from Captain America: The First Avenger as he'd not enjoyed the make-up needed to portray the character and, more specifically, seemed to be at odds with Marvel, stating that they were "impossible" to negotiate with.

For Infinity War, Ross Marquand (known as Aaron on The Walking Dead) voiced the former Nazi commander of Hydra during World War II, now referred to as the "Stonekeeper", and in a move that might've pleased Weaving if he'd negotiated a favourable deal, Red Skull was created largely through CGI and portrayed with stand-ins on set.

8. Something that wasn't created by CGI, although you may think it was, was Peter Parker's arm-hair raising Spidey-sense. This was all Tom Holland and produced by a production assistant blowing into his ear!

9. None of the cast of Avengers: Infinity War knew whether or not they would survive Thanos' snap until the day they shot the scene in an effort by the directors to prevent any spoilers leaking. Elizabeth Olsen, who plays Scarlet Witch, recalled how she and her co-stars were individually taken aside on set by the Russo Brothers to be told their fate in secret, away from any other actor/character not in the same snap scene as them.

However, because not everyone had an emotional snap scene, Leticia Wright, who plays Shuri, was apparently not briefed about her characters fate and only learned Shuri had not survived the snap after seeing her face on a black and white teaser poster for Avengers: Endgame.