When Marvel announced that Joe and Anthony Russo’s two Avengers: Infinity War movies would feature 67 characters, some people took it as an opportunity to laugh at how convoluted the mythology of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had become. After all, the movie was already being split into two parts, Harry Potter and Hunger Games-style, and the number 67 is almost two dozen characters more than the total number of main MCU heroes. At the time, it seemed like a lesson in excess.
But that was before. Now, thanks to a comment that the Russo brothers made at the Wizard World Cleveland Comic Con (via Cleveland.com), we know part one of Infinity War has become even bigger than we previously thought. Its story is too dramatic, its villain is too evil, and its team-ups are too epic to be carried by only 67 characters. That number is small, pitiful, and an insult to all of the world-building that has occurred in the MCU up to this point. No, in order to properly tell the tale of the Infinity War, the Russo brothers have revealed that they need 68 characters—a whole character more than before.
So who is this extra person? It could be a nobody with one line or some goon working for the bad guys, but no, it has to be someone important enough to the story that they simply had to pump up the character list from 67 names to 68. Maybe it’s Iron Man? Maybe the original draft for the script came in and everybody realized that it never mentioned Iron Man once. Or—god forbid—maybe they forgot to include Stellan Skarsgård’s Erik Selvig? You can’t make an Avengers movie without him, after all.