The hearts of Marvel fans around the world collectively broke last year when Avengers: Infinity War hit theaters, and delivered one of the most devastating endings in recent memory. Thanos succeeded in his plan to acquire all six Infinity Stones and one snap of his fingers wiped out half of all life in the universe. This event was straight out of the Infinity Gauntlet comics, though there was one major change. Instead of simply vanishing, those who were taken when the Snap occurred turned into dust.

To say that the "dusting" scenes in Avengers: Infinity War were difficult to watch is a massive understatement. Seeing each of those characters slowly fade into ash was such a punch to the gut, and that's exactly what the folks at Marvel were hoping for when they added the effect.

The new issue of Empire Magazine takes a deep dive into both Infinity War, and it's upcoming sequel, Avengers: Endgame. When discussing the Snap itself, and the way it worked into the two films, studio head Kevin Feige was asked where the idea came from to turn the victims into ash, rather than just have them disappear, as they did in the comics.

"Dan DeLeeuw, our visual effects supervisor, and our visual effects team, came up with the ash effect," Feige said. "We didn't want people to simply disappear, and people think that they teleported somewhere. It needed to seem much more permanent than that."

This was definitely the right decision for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it created an emotionally powerful sequence that left fans in a state of absolute shock. There's also the matter of fan theories to consider. Like Feige said, if the characters would have vanished, plenty of people would've thought that they teleported to some unknown location. Think back to the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, when Red Skull was evaporated by the Tesseract. There were theories for years after that movie suggesting the villain had gone to one place or another. This turned out to be true, as Red Skull showed back up in Infinity War, but Feige and the creative team wanted to make sure that didn't happen with Infinity War.

Ultimately, the Snap was just as effective as the studio had hoped, if not more so, and it really added to the already insane amount of excitement surrounding Endgame.

What was your initial reaction to the Snap in Avengers: Infinity War? Let us know in the comments!

Avengers: Engame is set to hit theaters on April 26th.

(h/t CBM)