Avengers: Infinity War looks on course to smash many box-office records, but does it also mark the beginning of the end for superhero movies?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War

He might be ugly, purple and the world's biggest film's biggest villain, but Kiwis sitting down to watch Avengers: Infinity War can feel a touch of pride in the character Thanos.

Wellington's Weta Digital created the digitally enhanced character, played by Josh Brolin, as well as the catastrophic battle on Titan, Thanos' home planet.

Marvel Avengers: Infinity War's evil villain Thanos on Titan, created by Weta Digital.

It was a huge task and one not taken lightly by Weta Digital's effects department team: They were asked to create pivotal scenes and backgrounds for the long awaited film, as well as making some of the film's main characters look like they really were duking it out superhero style in an intergalactic wasteland with weird gravity and an orange sky.

The titanic project was led by VFX Supervisor Matt Aitken, who said to make all that work, Thanos had to look alive and be capable of "subtle" and, ironically, very human expression.

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Marvel Studios Avengers: Infinity War is now screening.

Aitken, who's created visual effects with Weta Digital for 24 years, said the team had to come up with new techniques to bring that level of reality to the villain.

(Warning: There will be spoilers here...)

"There's a moment where Thanos and Iron Man have been fighting, and it's really the culmination of all the battles in the film," says Aitken.

Marvel Avengers: Infinity War's Nebula on the Planet Titan.

"It comes down to this personal conflict between Thanos and Iron Man. Thanos overcomes Iron Man and is about to kill him and there's a very subtle change in his expression where you can read that he realises he has won the battle. All he has to do is deliver the coup des grace and Iron Man will be dead.

"That wouldn't work if it was a broad expression change, it had to be very subtle and we were very pleased with the way that we were able to capture that moment."

To do it, they looked backwards to puppetry, as well as forwards, to digital arts.

Marvel Weta Digital designed the planet Titan and everything on it.

Given Thanos has bizarre, non-human proportions - a tiny nose, massive upper lip bit and big, old chin, it wasn't easy to have him give the same performance as Brolin and make it look so convincing.

"We needed to create a digital puppet for our digital character Thanos - he's 8 feet tall, he's purple and he's got a really crazy chin - but we also created a digital puppet of Josh Brolin and that was like an intermediary stage," Aitken explained.

"Rather than looking at the reference performance that Josh gave us and working that up into Thanos' performance directly, we instead recreated Josh's performance on his digital facsimile, the Josh Brolin actor puppet, and once we were confident we had very accurately captured his performance, then we were able to quite simply migrate the performance from the digital Josh across to the digital Thanos."

Marvel Avengers: Infinity War's Thanos.

Instead of having the actual Josh and a digital Thanos, Aitken said they had to have a third intermediary stage: The Digital Josh.

A fully detailed 3D scan was taken of Brolin's face as well as a "moving three dimensional scan" to obtain an accurate reference of the actor's expressions.

"By recreating that performance on a digital Josh we can compare the digital Josh with the reference footage of Josh, and have a very strong sense of confidence that we have captured all the nuances of Josh's performance," Aitken said.

If it sounds like complicated process, it is. But it's also a fun one.

When the team were offered the chance to create Dr Strange, Iron Man, Spider-Man and The Guardians of the Galaxy battling Thanos, the effects department sat down and brainstormed how the individual powers of the superheroes would affect Thanos in a fight, and how he would retaliate with the individual powers of the Infinity Stones in his gauntlet - collected during the course of the film.

"It's a very creative process that they're involved in," Aitken said. "It's really conjuring something spectacular out of thin air really.

"There was this aspect where both the heroes and Thanos are trying something and then it failing, so they're going to try something new again and again. There was a huge number of different effects that we had to come up with because each of these things had to be different and spectacular in its own way, whereas in other film projects we have developed maybe a particular Iron Man weapon effect and then used that through a whole sequence.

"It was a whole range of different effects that had to be worked out. The effects department did really fantastic work on developing this huge variety. I thinks it's spectacular."

After pouring all that creativity and imagination into the spectacular scenes, Aitken insists he doesn't have a favourite character. Though he admits Iron Man holds a special place in his heart.

"He was the first Marvel movie I saw," Aitken said. "He's a great character and the fact we go to do this incredibly gritty scene with him in Thanos was really fantastic, it was hugely satisfying work."

Marvel's Avengers: Infinity Wars is screening now.