Avengers: Infinity War has some really great superhero action sequences, but one of them was a bit different than the rest. Specifically, it was surprisingly short. When Spider-Man and Iron Man take down Ebony Maw the battle is quite brief, with the Maw being blown out the side of his own spacecraft before he knows what happened. The creators of Avengers: Infinity War have explained that they were inspired by a classic moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark, because that particular scene didn't need to be any longer. According to co-director Joe Russo...
A lot of discussion about how to dispatch of Maw here. It was probably one of the most talked about thing in the movie. Eventually we decided that, like Indy with the... he puts the whip down and he pulls out his gun. That something quick and efficient would be more surprising than something belabored. Because there's an incredible amount of action in the movie, we felt like we didn't need another 5-minute action sequence.
The fight begins after Peter Parker asks Tony Stark if he's ever seen Aliens, as the scene uses the vacuum of space to suck out Ebony Maw in just the same way Ripley did the creature in the classic sci-fi film, but it seems that Raiders of the Lost Ark was an equally important influence on the moment, as the idea was to get the audience ready for a fight, then surprise them with how quickly it ended.
The fact that the movie already had enough action wasn't the only reason the creative team decided to cut this particular sequence short, as co-writer Stephen Markus reminds us in the commentary track on the new Avengers: Infinity War Blu-ray...
We also just saw a fight between these exact characters in New York.
With so many different characters to move around the board, viewers want to see as many different combinations as possible, and so watching a second fight scene between characters that already had a great battle once, even though the fight would almost certainly be great, just isn't worth the time. It would be one thing if the second fight took place later in the movie, but the New York fight had just happened and there was basically nothing new this time around.
It this scene was talked about a lot, then it's likely the scene went very differently at different points during the creation process. It's likely that at one time or another there was a much bigger action scene here. I'm sure it was probably great, all of the action in Avengers: Infinity War is pretty great, but, in the end, it's simply not necessary.
