Avengers: Infinity War Part I and II To Be An MCU Unifier

With Avengers: Infinity Wars the Russo brothers are laying it all on the table.  Well, actually, it's all up on a board.

"We have so many characters we're dealing with.  We're breaking new ground on Avengers: Infinity War.  We have a board with 67 characters on it."

Those 67 characters include superheroes, villains, and S.H.I.E.L.D.agents.  The one question that everyone is asking, though, is if the Guardians of the Galaxy characters are part of that group.  Here's the answer they gave during an interview with Comicbook.com while at New Orleans WizardWorld:

"That is another one that we would have to reserve as a surprise, but we will say this.  People will not be disappointed in the amount of characters in the movie.  The concept of Infinity War is that the Marvel universe unites to battle the greatest threat to the world and the universe that you've ever seen, and we're going to honor that concept."

That seems to me that they are saying that the Guardians are going to be a part of the movie.  How can you have "the greatest threat to the world and the universe" and not have them be a part of it?  That's just my own take away from the interview, though.  Obviously, nothing has been confirmed on this subject. 

One of the more interesting parts of the interview came when they were asked how they were going to tackle cosmic side of films after filming two very gritty and (to a point) realistic movies in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War.  Here's what they said:

"Yeah, we certainly have.  I sat in the theater and watched Empire Strikes Back seven times in a row when I was a kid.  Yeah, we're science fiction fans as well, Dungeons and Dragons.  We collected all the books when we were kids.  We had figurines.  Anything that you could think of that has to do with fantasy or sci-fi or superheroes was in our universe.  We're just going to approach the cosmic side with the same fervor that we did the earthbound work we've been doing.  We also are going to work really hard to bring a psychological realism.  We obviously can't bring a naturalism to it because it doesn't really exist outside of science fiction, but we can bring that psychological realism to it, to the characters, and that's going to be our focus."

"Also, it's going to be our focus to explore the cosmic side, applying the same rules that we like to apply to the last two films that we've done.  It ends up being the rules of physics always apply or apply as much as we can get them to apply based on what we're doing."

Lastly, they had this to say about shaking up the Avengers line-up:

"Everything is finite, right? Nothing can last forever...It's cyclical. Some new Avengers in phase 4 are going to become prominent and then maybe some Avengers might not be around anymore. So, we'll see how all this plays out but you have to treat every character with respect. I think it's interesting that if you've seen four or five movies with the lead character having an arc, I want to see some story telling from some of the secondary characters. We're focusing on that right now with Infinity War while we're breaking into those movies, is which characters can we pull to the forefront who potentially haven't had their own 'A' story arc to this point. I think you'll see that the supporting Avengers are going to become primary Avengers."

Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 is scheduled for release May 4, 2018, with Avengers: Infinity War Part 2 coming out one year later on May 3, 2019.