Infinity War: The Russos Reveal Why ‘Beta Ray Bill’ Wasn’t In The Film

Infinity War saw the debut of Stormbreaker in the MCU, but many fans are still wondering about Stormbreaker’s original owner from the comics: Beta Ray Bill.

During a ‘Q & A’ after the screening of Infinity War, directors Anthony and Joe Russo discussed why Beta Ray Bill wasn’t a part of the film.

“So many characters,” Joe Russo said. “Beta Ray Bill has been discussed many times. He was one of my favorite characters as a kid, but it’s just, really, functionally, where does he fit? We’ve got a lot of characters that you care about that we’re trying to tell the stories about, a long arcing narrative about, and when new characters come into the world they have to have an effect on the story otherwise there’s no value in introducing them and we just didn’t have the space in a film like this to do that.”

Anthony Russo added, “To be honest with you when we were starting this we didn’t know if we could pull off the number of characters that we ended up pulling off because there’s no model for a movie with this many characters. There’s nothing you can look back, there’s no structure that you can look to and lean on that says, ‘Oh, here’s how a narrative can be built with this number of characters.’ The whole process was us just sort of figuring out how do you take even the number of character we had and sort of pay them off all properly in the story.”

Many fans may have noticed that the Stormbreaker forged in Infinity War doesn’t look like Beta Ray Bill’s hammer but resembles the version of Mjolnir from the Ultimate Universe. Marvel Studios artist Ryan Meinerding revealed the reason behind this in The Art of Avengers: Infinity War book.

“I always felt that Beta Ray Bill’s weapon from the comics – Stormbreaker – was a little too similar to Mjolnir,” Meinerding says. “So I was looking to more of the Mjolnir from The Ultimates, where it has more corners and edges, and feels more like a heavy, solid thing as opposed to another Mjolnir-sized weapon–almost that it feels unbalanced. It’s almost too powerful. It really takes someone incredibly powerful just to pick it up because it’s such an unbalanced weapon.”