(Warning: Avengers: Endgame spoilers ahead!)
The final battle that takes place in Avengers: Endgame is pretty epic, to say the least. It begins with Captain America, Thor and Iron Man doing battle with 2014’s version of Thanos, but then unfolds into something much bigger, with his Black Order taking on many returning characters and their allies. In a word, it’s epic, but originally it was even longer.
While speaking with The New York Times, Endgame writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus talked about the final battle. Oddly enough, it was actually supposed to be much bigger than what fans saw in the final film.
The “even much longer battle,” according to the duo, had “its own three act structure.” Alas, it didn’t quite go as planned.
“It didn’t play well,” McFeely says of the excited sequences, “But we had a scene in a trench where, for reasons, the battle got paused for about three minutes and now there’s 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 added, “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.”
On top of that, there was concern that some key moments may not make the final cut. For instance, a scene where several female Avengers characters gathering together to lend Captain Marvel a hand.
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Said McFeely, “There was much conversation. Is that delightful or is it pandering? We went around and around on that. Ultimately we went, we like it too much.”
Markus confirmed this as well, adding, “Part of the fun of the Avengers movies has always been team-ups. Marvel has been amassing this huge roster of characters. You’ve got crazy aliens. You’ve got that many badass women. You’ve got three or four people in Iron Man suits.”
We’ll have to see if any of this extra footage makes the cut in Endgame’s eventual home release later this year. In the meantime, the movie has done quite well in its current form, making over $1.2 billion worldwide.
Avengers: Endgame is now in theaters. What do you think about its concluding battle? Let us know in the comments below!
