[SPOILERS] Avengers: Endgame writers reveal some alternate ideas they had for the film

The following article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. Please refrain from reading the below article until you’ve seen the movie.

Avengers: Endgame has finally come out and given fans the conclusion they deserved for a massive franchise that has spanned the past 11-years and featured a total of 22 films. The movie may not be perfect, but it felt epic, truly roused the emotions and paid fan service in a way no other movie before it could.

Making a film that delivers on its promises like that is no easy feat and credit needs to go to writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely for weaving a story that also takes the characters even further than ever before and allows them to put in arguably the best acting performances required in the Marvel Universe to date.

It’s a feat of writing that wasn’t without its revisions though and in a recent interview with The New York Times, the pair revealed some of the other ideas they had for the film that either had to be changed in writing or cut from the film altogether.

One of the highlights of the film was obviously taking fans back into scenes from previous films as our team of Avengers tries to recover Infinity Stones from the past.  This allowed them to eventually travel to New York in 2012, Asgard in 2013, Vormir and Morag in 2014, and Camp Lehigh in 1970 and gave them the opportunity to revisit locations and times from The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War, and the first two Captain America movies.

It wasn’t always this way though as the pair revealed some alternate ideas they had for these quests which would’ve seen our Avengers go in completely different directions like send to Tony Stark to Asgard:

McFeely: We went back to Asgard. But there’s a moment in the MCU if you’re paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault. In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him.

Markus: Thor had long scenes with Natalie Portman. And Morag was hugely complicated.

McFeely: It was underwater! That was clever but it was just too big a set piece. What that didn’t do is allow for Thanos and his daughters to get on the trail at the right moment. So we went back to when Peter Quill was there. And we realized that when you can punch Quill in the face, it’s hilarious. I still think it’s hilarious.

Markus: There were entirely other trips taken. They went to the Triskelion at one point to get the [Tesseract], and then somebody was going to get into a car and drive to Doctor Strange’s house.

While I would’ve loved to see Stark take on Heimdall, in the end, I think the writers got it right in selecting the best periods to retrieve the stones that had the biggest impact on the characters and the story. So, it’s a great thing they decided to revise some of these initial ideas. Obviously, another big highlight of the film is the climactic battle with Thanos which is filled with several moments of fist-pumping delight. It’s a long scene already as it stands, but Markus and McFeely revealed that this scene was also a lot longer at one point in time and eventually got cut to make it flow better:

McFeely: It didn’t play well, but we had a scene in a trench where, for reasons, the battle got paused for about three minutes and now there are 18 people all going, “What are we going to do?” “I’m going to do this.” “I’m going to do this.” Just bouncing around this completely fake, fraudulent scene. When you have that many people, it invariably is, one line, one line, one line. And that’s not a natural conversation.

Markus: It also required them to find enough shelter to have a conversation in the middle of the biggest battle. It wasn’t a polite World War I battle where you have a moment.

My mind is still wrapped around Avengers: Endgame and what it was able to achieve. All of which pales in comparison to what it is doing to the Box Office at the moment as well. What is your favourite moment from Avengers: Endgame?

Last Updated: April 30, 2019