Why was everyone surprised at the Avengers: Infinity War ending if the exact same thing happened in the comics?

The short of it is that, statistically speaking, nobody read either The Thanos Quest or The Infinity Gauntlet.

To illustrate what I mean it’s time for a lesson about comic book sales.

The best-selling superhero comic book character of all time is Superman, with more than 600 million books sold to date. Batman, One Piece, and Spider-Man follow along behind him in the 300–500 million range. black canary costumes

That’s a bit of a misleading figure, however, as that represents books sold across their entire run as a title characters, not sales of the same book. That’s people buying book after book on basically a subscription model for decades. To get an idea how many individual readers comics actually have, you need to take into account single issues.

The best-selling single issue of a comic is X-Men No. 1, at about 8 million copies sold.

The remainder of the top 10 list tends to sit at between 0.5 to 5 million copies. The #10 is The Amazing Spider-Man No. 583, at only 530,000 copies. It should be noted that breaking half a million copies of a single issue sold is nothing short of completely miraculous in the comic book industry, as it makes an issue a contender for the ten very best-selling books ever. thea queen cosplay

The Thanos Quest and The Infinity Gauntlet, which are essentially the source material for the Infinity War movie, are not on that list at all. Meaning, less than half a million people, maybe even less than a hundred thousand people, actually read it. There’s a non-zero chance that there’s more people who’ve played Thanos in Fortnite than there are people who have seen any of the comics he’s ever been in.

The movies? Easily viewed by tens of millions worldwide. Infinity War can probably be safely estimated to break a hundred million viewers. Mind you, that doesn’t make the sales of the comics unimpressive in terms of their own medium, but the proportion of the movies’ audience who would’ve been familiar with this storyline from the comics is absolutely tiny.

So, even supposing the source material for this exists and could inform you of the intended direction of the story, not nearly enough people are familiar enough with it that filmgoing audiences, even MCU movie enthusiasts, could be expected to know what’s going to happen.

That suits our boy Thanos just fine. red arrow costumes