While Thanos himself is a verifiable tyrant, war-criminal and out and out awful being, one thing there's no denying is that writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely made the right decision to drop 'Death' from his backstory.
In the original Infinity Gauntlet storyline, Thanos embarks on his mad quest to end half the life in the universe in a vein attempt to woo the living embodiment of Death. The act of wiping out half of existence is equally cruel - there's no denying that - but knowing that it was done to impress a spirit just makes Thanos feel less intimidating.
The onscreen Thanos, on the other hand, boasts a fanaticism that - when taken alongside his power - makes him genuinely terrifying. His dogmatic streak bears the echoes of real-life tyrants, and rooting the Mad Titan in that context makes him twice as scary as his comic book counterpart.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
