How Captain America Holds Back Thanos In Avengers: Infinity War

How Captain America Holds Back Thanos In Avengers: Infinity War

Some SPOILERS for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame to follow.

In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos beats the brakes off of the Hulk in hand-to-hand combat and, with an assist from Peter Quill, defeats the Guardians of the Galaxy and members of the Avengers in the battle on Titan. Yet, towards the end of the film, in a scene from the trailers that at the time seemed to herald his death, Captain America holds back Thanos’ gauntleted hand.

Not to take anything away from Steve Rogers, but no amount of Super Soldier Serum should have made him able to physically withstand Thanos to that degree, especially after the feats we had already seen the Mad Titan pull off. But there is an explanation for how Captain America holds Thanos back in Avengers: Infinity War, as screenwriter Christopher Markus explained:

I think in that moment, Thanos is impressed by Steve's will. He's like, 'I can't believe this guy who apparently has no powers is trying this.' He's almost like, 'Really? Really?'

Steve Rogers is giving his all in that moment, and he has always shown an ability to punch above his weight and ‘do this all day’, but that does not account for what happens in this moment in Infinity War. Instead, holding back Thanos is more the result of Thanos not going all out than Cap being any sort of physical match for him.

As Christopher Markus told The Hollywood Reporter, in that moment, Thanos is impressed by the display of will and courage from Captain America. The fact that a puny human, devoid of any cosmic-level powers would challenge him in such a way catches Thanos off guard and that results in him kind of taking things slowly and pondering Cap for a moment.

You can see this in Josh Brolin’s Thanos performance too. When Cap first holds back Thanos, the Mad Titan appears surprised and curious. He is impressed with Captain America’s strength of will, and given his conversation with Tony Stark on Titan, we know that Thanos appreciates and respects those who put up a good fight against him.

Eventually Thanos gets over being flabbergasted by Cap and tires of him. He then actually exerts some force and easily overpowers Cap before knocking him out. So, as strong as he is, it was never a case of Captain America truly matching Thanos in a game of strength. But just the mere fact that Cap’s will impressed Thanos, he of “the hardest choices require the strongest wills,” says a lot about Steve Rogers.

Cap’s resistance against Thanos is also not an instance of the Infinity Gauntlet in some way sensing Cap is worthy to wield it and tempering its power. The Infinity Gauntlet is not Mjolnir, which evaluates a person and judges them worthy or not. As we saw in Avengers: Endgame, you either can withstand its power or you can’t.

You can see Cap’s rematch with Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, now playing. Check out our 2019 Release Schedule to keep track of summer’s biggest movies and stay tuned to CinemaBlend for all the latest news from the MCU.

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How The Curse of La Llorona Is Connected To The Conjuring Universe

How The Curse of La Llorona Is Connected To The Conjuring Universe

Very mild spoilers ahead from The Curse of La Llorona.

The Curse of La Llorona hasn't been heavily promoted as a Conjuring movie, but it is quietly haunting The Conjuring Universe as the sixth entry in the series. The horror film marks the directorial debut of Michael Chaves, whose follow-up film is The Conjuring 3, which comes out in 2020.

The Curse of La Llorona recently screened at South by Southwest, confirming how the movie connects to the Conjuring universe. The movie is set in Los Angeles in 1973, and has the connective tissue of Father Perez (Tony Amendola), who returns to the story from Annabelle. In this film, Father Perez talks to Anna Garcia (Linda Cardellini) about his evil doll case, and the doll is flashed on screen to further drive home the connection (per Bloody Disgusting).

The 2014 Annabelle movie was also set in Southern California, with the story in 1967. The Conjuring, which came out in 2013, was set in 1971. The Conjuring 2 was set in 1976 and 1977. So The Curse of La Llorona appears to fit into the timeline between between the first two Conjuring movies, just a few years after Father Perez's experience in Annabelle.

Since The Curse of La Llorona just screened, critics and fans have been sharing their early thoughts online. CinemaBlend's own Sean O'Connell felt the film compared poorly to previous Conjuring movies, although he had fond words for Linda Cardellini:

Perri Nemiroff of Collider also had some measured praise, calling it a solid start for future Conjuring 3 director Michael Chaves:

Erik Davis of Fandango had a much simpler warning about the movie -- it may leave you afraid to visit your own attic:

The Curse of La Llorona was produced by James Wan, who directed the first two Conjuring films before passing the reins to Michael Chaves for the upcoming third movie. This is the sixth film in The Conjuring Universe after The Conjuring, Annabelle, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle: Creation, and The Nun. It precedes Annabelle 3, aka Annabelle Comes Home, which just announced its title and June 28, 2019 release date. The Conjuring 3 is reportedly scheduled for September 11, 2020. The Crooked Man should be following them at some point, but there's no set date right now.

The Curse of La Llorona opens in theaters on April 19, yep one week before Avengers: Endgame. Pray for it. The horror movie is just one of the many films releasing in theaters in 2019.

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Keira Knightley Says She Only Watches Her Films Once

Keira Knightley Says She Only Watches Her Films Once

We all have favorite actors that we love to see in movies. We'll watch our favorite performances and favorite stories again and again. However, not every actor who makes those movies is quite as excited to watch them as the rest of us. Keira Knightley recently admitted that she doesn't like to watch herself on screen and will usually only watch her films once. According to Knightley...

No, yeah. I dunno, it’s just weird. It’s like hearing your own voice. I dunno and I only see the bad bits. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, why did I do that?’

As somebody who regularly has to transcribe interviews I have done, I know exactly how strange, and largely off-putting, hearing your own voice can be. It seems that for Keira Knightley, the experience is only amplified. She not only has to hear her own voice, but see herself on screen and watch all the decisions that she made, including the ones she wishes she could do over.

Knightley says she only watches her movies once "if that." I would assume that question comes down to whether or not she attends the premiere of her movies. If she makes it, that's probably the only time she ever sees the film in question. If she doesn't for whatever reason, then she probably never bothers to go back and see the final product.

Knightley is far from the only person who avoids watching her own work. Many in Hollywood have talked about how they rarely if ever watch themselves. Putting yourself up on the screen like that makes an actor quite vulnerable. However, it probably doesn't necessity feel that way when you're shooting the movie. As long as you never go back and watch the movie, you don't realize how much of yourself you're putting out there. Honestly, it's far better than if she loved her own movies so much that she watched them a lot. If that happened, we'd have to worry.

Check out Keira Knightley's full comments on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in the clip below.

Of course, one has to wonder if Keira Knightley might start watching more of her movies again over the next several years. She has a three and a half year old daughter, as she told Jimmy Fallon, and one has to assume that as that girl gets older and begins to understand just what it is her mother does, the kid is going to want to watch those films. As she becomes old enough to see them, Knightley might find her movies on in her house whether she likes it or not. Whether or not she likes that. Perhaps by then she'll be more comfortable with them.

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Watch The Awesome Trailer For Universal’s New Jurassic World Ride

Watch The Awesome Trailer For Universal’s New Jurassic World Ride

Last year, the legendary theme park attraction Jurassic Park: The Ride sailed its final voyage through Isla Nublar and closed down for refurbishment at Universal Studios Hollywood. That refresh was in the name of an updated attraction that swam in the same waters, but in service of promoting the Jurassic World franchise.

Now we have our first hint at what the updated attraction will look like, with the trailer below. Dear readers, welcome, to Jurassic World: The Ride:

The trailer starts out simple enough, with a western being filmed on the Universal Studios backlot. But before things get too shooty, an astronaut runs into frame with a familiar one word warning: “Run!” As one would expect, the chase scatters a bunch of other costumed actors running through the Universal lot, which results in Roberta the Tyrannosaurus Rex breaking through the Universal Studios arch.

It’s at this point that Jurassic World: The Ride finally shows itself through our first look at what exactly will be part of this new theme park attraction; and it’s here where we see something rather interesting. Pictured in the video is a boat that looks like one of the boats last seen in the Jurassic Park: The Ride attraction, only this time it’s stopped in the middle of the attraction.

Conveniently enough, the boat is stopped in front of a Mosasaurus tank, just in time for the beastie to charge towards the glass and make a hole. Water squirts out, the audience looks frightened and the boat moves on to bigger, scarier thrills, like the previously confirmed showdown between the famed T-Rex and “new behemoth dinosaurs.”

While Jurassic World: The Ride sounded pretty intense when described in the vaguest of terms, this new ride’s promise of more realistic terror is even more promising. The footage of how the ride’s supposed to work only makes for more excitement, as it looks like a digital screen approach similar to the Fast & Furious: Supercharged or Skull Island: Reign of Kong attractions, which be used to show some of the creatures at hand.

Though we wouldn’t count out any thrills and spills using original, or brand new, animatronics in Jurassic World: The Ride, as even those updated attractions still retain an actual physical element to their thrills. Of course, this is all speculation at this moment, but for now, taking a look into the world of this future adventure 65 million years in the making has us longing for our first chance to take that ride for ourselves.

Jurassic World: The Ride does not have an official opening date past the originally specified timeframe of this summer. However, Universal Studios Hollywood recommends checking back on their official website for any future updates.

And if you still want to ride Jurassic Park: The Ride, it’s still in operation at Universal Studios Japan, as well as Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando for the time being. Which has us wondering if any revamps to the latter park’s attraction could involve Roberta squaring off against Fluffy from the Harry Potter series. Just a suggestion, Universal.

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How Does One Return The Soul Stone? We Asked The Avengers: Endgame Writers

How Does One Return The Soul Stone? We Asked The Avengers: Endgame Writers

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. If you have not yet seen the film, read on at your own risk!

While we don’t actually see it play out, Captain America takes on one hell of a mission at the end of Avengers: Endgame. Needing to shut down off-shoots in reality, he volunteers to travel in time and put the Infinity Stones back where they belong – ultimately also deciding to live out a normal life with Peggy Carter and fully experience the second half of the 20th century. Most of the trip is pretty straight forward, from bringing the Tesseract back to the secret S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in 1970, to bringing the Power Stone back to Morag in 2014, but of the individual six missions, the returning of the Soul Stone would seem to be a strange and unique challenge.

As audiences will remember, unlike most of the Infinity Stones (which could be taken by the Avengers provided they had proper containment), the Soul Stone was a bit trickier to acquire. Rather than simply being recovered from an amulet or extracted with a special device, obtaining the ingot not only required a trip to the mysterious planet Vormir, but also making an important sacrifice. Knowing this, an interesting question is raised about Captain America’s final mission: how does one go about returning the Soul Stone?

This is a matter that vigorously rolled around in my head following my first screening of Avengers: Endgame, and I was fortunate enough to recently have the opportunity to ask the perfect people about it. Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely for the latest episode of our HeroBlend podcast, and I made it a personal priority to ask them about the Soul Stone. It was a question that they not only appreciated, but also had an answer for, explaining,

Stephen McFeely: It's a good question. I think it is an everlasting exchange.

Christopher Markus: There's a slot.

Stephen McFeely: That's right. Yeah, that's right. It's like an old time bank. It's a pneumatic tube.

Christopher Markus: You put it back, but you don't get anything in return. It's not like a pawn shop.

There was some hope among fans that Captain America returning the Soul Stone to Vormir would potentially mean the resurrection of Black Widow, who died so that the Avengers could acquire the key treasure during their time heist, but that’s evidently not the case. While Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's answer was a tad jokey, it seems that once that particular trade is made, there are no takebacks - so despite Cap making the effort to fix the timeline, that particular death is permanent.

This information also seems to confirm that the upcoming Black Widow movie will definitely be a period piece that will be set prior to the events of Avengers: Endgame. This is something that has been rumored for a while now, but if the titular heroine is most definitely dead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe then there really aren’t any other story options available to the filmmakers.

Of course, there is also still another major component that needs to be discussed here, which is that Captain America returning the Soul Stone would presumably also result in a reunion with his World War II nemesis, Johann Schmidt a.k.a. the Red Skull. Because of the way things play out in Avengers: Endgame, it’s a situation that is simply left to our imaginations, but one has to figure that Steve Rogers would be pretty damn surprised to discover the fate of the former head of Hydra following his handling of the Tesseract in 1945.

That being said, the writers of the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster definitely wish it was a reunion that they could have somehow included in the movie. After all, in addition to writing both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, they also penned the scripts for the entire Captain America trilogy. I asked Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely if the 2019 film had ever included a scene where Cap and Red Skull were reunited, and they explained what happened thusly:

Christopher Markus: That was hard for me personally to get over.

Stephen McFeely: That's right. That's true. I remember.

Christopher Markus: Because I very much wanted like, 'How are we not getting Cap into space to see the Red Skull?’ And it just otherwise was not the story to tell for Cap, but it is extremely tempting.

And while one could hope that perhaps someday we’ll get to see a movie that features Captain America’s version of Infinity Watch, it sadly sounds like that’s never going to happen. This is specifically because directors Joe and Anthony Russo have confirmed Chris Evans’ retirement playing the character, and that’s most definitely a film that you couldn’t make without him. Perhaps the actor will eventually change his mind and decided that he really misses the character, but for now audiences should really just feel satisfied with the perfect send-off that he gets in the new film.

This particular conversation is just a taste of the awesome, deep dive discussion I got to have with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely about Avengers: Endgame, so do yourself a favor and listen to the HeroBlend interview in full by clicking play on the embed below!

Does this take on the Soul Stone jive with your own personal theories following Avengers: Endgame? Are you like Christopher Markus and truly wish that a Captain America-Red Skull reunion happened on the big screen? Let your voice be heard in the comments section below.

Avengers: Endgame is now playing in theaters all around the world, and we’re really only just getting started with our in-depth analysis and what the movie means for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have many more features and articles coming your way in the next few weeks, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend – and be sure to subscribe to our HeroBlend podcast so that you’ll get to listen to new episodes as they are released every Friday!

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Mark Hamill's Answer To A Luke And Leia Question Was Perfect For Game Of Thrones Fans

Mark Hamill's Answer To A Luke And Leia Question Was Perfect For Game Of Thrones Fans

Star Wars fans seasoned enough to have seen the original trilogy play out in movie theaters were surprised to learn Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia were actually twins -- not to mention the children of Darth Vader. It was quite a twist, and it certainly changed the dynamic between Luke and Leia.

In the first Star Wars movie, Luke was pretty obviously crushing on Leia. She later even kissed him on the lips. The relationship took on a new level of Game of Thrones awkwardness when the big reveal was announced -- and Leia responded by saying somehow she'd always known Luke was her bro. (Really, girl? OK.)

Welp, Luke didn't always know, and neither did Mark Hamill, who had this classic response when a fan asked when he learned about the sibling twist:

Yeah, maybe George Lucas should've stepped in and told Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher to save room for the holy ghost in that steamy photo.

If anyone understands inappropriate twin lust, it's a Lannister. Since the final season of Game of Thrones is now airing, Star Wars fans couldn't help but reply with references to Jaime and Cersei Lannister:

Jaime and Cersei Lannister started Game of Thrones as the twin couple who were caught, um, together at the end of the very first episode. Now the Lannisters are estranged -- although Cersei is pregnant with Jaime's baby -- and it's Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen who are the new incestuous relations gettin' it on. Dany and Jon just found out she is his biological aunt, and at least there's some awkwardness there. (He's uncomfortable that they're related; she's just upset that his claim is now stronger than hers.)

Star Wars and Game of Thrones have another thing in common in that they are ending their main sagas this year, but have more spinoff projects in the works.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the end of the Skywalker Saga, and will include both Mark Hamill's Luke and Carrie Fisher's Leia. We lost Fisher during filming for The Last Jedi, but The Rise of Skywalker is using previously unseen footage from The Force Awakens to keep Leia in Episode IX. Luke apparently died in The Last Jedi but will still be back for the final movie, along with the also presumed dead Emperor Palpatine. Sadly, Mark Hamill never got the Luke/Leia/Han reunion he wanted (or at least we don't think he did).

Mark Hamill previously talked about a recurring silly fight he had with Carrie Fisher on Luke's royal status. He has none, as Fisher kept trying to point out, despite Hamill wanting Luke to be a prince alongside her princess. Maybe Fisher had some Game of Thrones to her in that respect, too -- the ladies want to rule!

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in theaters on December 20. Game of Thrones Season 8 continues Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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Tim Miller Reveals Terminator In Dark Fate’s Cool New Ability

Tim Miller Reveals Terminator In Dark Fate’s Cool New Ability

Although Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face is the one folks usually envision first when thinking about Terminators, as we’ve seen numerous times over the decades, that’s not the only visage these cybernetic assassins use. This year’s Terminator: Dark Fate will throw several new Terminators into action, including one played by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actor Gabriel Luna. What distinguishes this Terminator model from the others? Well, he has the ability to split himself in two!

During the Paramount presentation at CinemaCon today, Terminator: Dark Fate director Tim Miller came out to plug his latest movie, which he worked on closely with the man who launched this sci-fi saga, James Cameron, who is serving as a producer on Dark Fate. One of the things he revealed is how Gabriel Luna’s Terminator can duplicate itself. This is a byproduct of Luna’s Terminator either being a T-1000 model or a more advanced model with those same liquid metal properties. The T-1000 model was previously played by Robert Patrick in Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Lee Byung-hun in Terminator Genisys.

There was also footage from Terminator: Dark Fate screened that showed Gabriel Luna’s Terminator in action. One shot began with him starting as a black puddle and then rising up to assume his human form. Later on, he was seen chasing after Natalia Reyes’ Dani Ramos and Mackenzie Davis’ Grace. Then another Terminator that was basically an all-black metal skeleton showed up, indicating that this could be the Luna duplicate, and that Dani and Grace are now being attacked on two fronts. Fortunately for them, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor arrives with guns blazing to help the other women out of their troublesome predicament.

The T-800 model may still be the most common Terminator model that Skynet churns out, but there’s no denying that the T-1000 is an even greater killing machine. Its shapeshifting abilities allow it to disguise itself as anybody or anything it sees, as well shrug off all physical injuries. Robert Patrick’s T-1000 was only finally defeated by being pushed into a vat of molten steel, while Lee Byung-hun’s iteration was neutralized when it was caught in a shower of hydrochloric acid. Presumably Gabriel Luna’s model shares these few weaknesses, but the fact that it can split itself in two means that even if the Terminator: Dark Fate protagonists manage to destroy one copy, they’ll have to put just as much effort, if not more, into taking out the other. Talk about upping the stakes!

No specific plot details for Terminator: Dark Fate have been revealed yet, although rather than follow the events of Terminator Genisys, this movie is a direct sequel to The Terminator and Terminator 2, and will ignoring the other sequels. Along with Linda Hamilton reprising Sarah Connor, Arnold Schwarzenegger will return once more to play an older T-800 model. Diego Boneta and Enrique Arce are also part of the main cast, and Jude Collie serves the body double for the young John Connor, with Edward Furlong’s facial likeness from Terminator 2 being digitally applied.

Terminator: Dark Fate hits theaters on November 1. Be sure to look through our 2019 release schedule to learn what other movies are coming out this year.

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