Avengers: Endgame took secrecy to all new levels with its intentionally spoiler-free
marketing efforts.
Once the movie was released, though, the behind-the-scenes info began pouring out.
Here are some of the most interesting things to emerge.
It's a well-known fact that directors Joe and Anthony Russo will go to extreme lengths
to keep their Marvel creations under wraps.
For example, they teasingly apologized to the spoiler-prone Tom Holland for dusting
Spidey at the end of Infinity War and consequently keeping him at arm's length for the promotion
of Endgame.
They also pretended to fire Mark Ruffalo after a string of spoilers had put him on thin ice.
One of the best methods for keeping everyone in the dark, though, was the way the Russos
handled the script.
Most of the actors only got pieces of the screenplay to work from, and apparently, Ruffalo
got a particularly spoiler-proof version of the script.
The Hulk actor was only given a partial script with additional dummy scenes in it, according
to an interview with E! News:
"I don't know what's gonna happen.
I shot like five different endings.
I didn't even get a whole script for this movie."
But even that didn't stop him from accidentally giving something away.
In that same interview, he joked about what he presumably thought was one of those "dummy
scenes."
The spoiler?
"He gets married in this!"
"They have to throw Mark off the scent."
Oops…
Endgame is the second MCU outing for Carol Danvers, who arrived on the scene just weeks
earlier in her own superhero flick, Captain Marvel.
For actress Brie Larson, though, that wasn't the case.
Larson had filmed her scenes for Endgame before she ever had a chance to flesh out the character
in her own film.
As an added twist, the first scene she ever filmed was set during the events of Endgame,
but technically ended up in Captain Marvel.
On The Tonight Show, Larson recalled that her first day of filming was for the end credit
scene for her own film, which showed her arriving at the Avengers facility post-snap.
"Whip pans to me and I go, 'Where's Fury?'
I didn't know that was the tag for Captain Marvel.
I didn't know what that was that we were shooting.
There was also no one else there."
In true Russo fashion, though, the actress was only given her lines and filmed her part
alone in front of a green screen.
That's taking secrecy to a whole new level.
While the Russo brothers bent over backwards to keep actors like Ruffalo, Holland, and
Larson from spoiling the script, there was one person that they didn't mind showing the
whole thing to: Robert Downey Jr.
While discussing Infinity War and Endgame in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, the
pair talked about keeping things secret:
"RDJ was probably the only one to actually read the entire script."
"Evans might have read the script."
"Part of our motivation to do that is that it just takes a lot of pressure off of people."
Everything had started with Iron Man just a decade earlier.
With Endgame ultimately serving as the Iron Avenger's swan song, it's only appropriate
that RDJ would be trusted with some of the most sensitive MCU knowledge to ever exist.
When the Avengers break into teams for their time heist in Endgame, Rocket and Thor are
sent to Asgard during the events of Thor: The Dark World to retrieve the Reality Stone.
At that point in time, the Stone is using the God of Thunder's ex, Jane Foster, as a
host.
Foster, who's been absent from Marvel films since The Dark World, appears onscreen a few
times before Rocket is able to get the Reality Stone out of her.
But it turns out that Foster actress Natalie Portman didn't actually film any new footage
for Endgame.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Russos explained that they had been able
to salvage unused footage from The Dark World in order to get all of the scenes they needed.
While the footage was enough for them to work with, they did ask the actress to record a
small bit of voice-over.
In the days after Endgame lit up the theater marquees, Star-Lord actor Chris Pratt stirred
up attention by releasing a video he'd taken on set while preparing for one of the film's
key action sequences.
The once-in-a-lifetime video showed nearly all of the famous actors, mostly in sweats
and comfortable clothing, chatting and discussing their scenes as casually as if they were a
group of high schoolers hanging out after class.
The video gave a unique glimpse into the inner workings of a film that had been kept tightly
under wraps since day one.
Stan Lee was a comic book titan for over half a century.
While he was an important creative mind behind the scenes for decades, his long relationship
with Marvel also led to a memorable series of fan-favorite cameos throughout various
Marvel movies.
When Lee passed away in late 2018, fans began theorizing about when his last cameo would
surface.
A year earlier, it had been revealed that Lee had filmed five different cameos for upcoming
films.
The fact that he was apparently batching his cameos naturally left the possibility that
he could be popping into films for an indefinite amount of time.
Endgame delivered a shot of a younger-looking hippie version of Lee driving by the 1970's
S.H.I.E.L.D.
headquarters shouting, "Make love, not war!"
As it turned out, that scene will be Lee's last ever cameo, and it's a fitting farewell.
The Russos confirmed after the fact that it's the last Stan Lee cameo that made it to film.
In a twist that few people saw coming in Endgame, Natasha Romanoff ended up sacrificing herself
for the Soul Stone.
It was a beautifully redemptive way to end her own heroic story, which had been going
on in the background for nearly the entire MCU.
But, of course, this is Marvel, and there's always the question of whether they'll bring
her back.
With Gamora's re-entrance into the future from the past in Endgame, anything is possible.
Except, not with Romanoff her story seems closed for good this time.
Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explained to The New York Times:
"Her journey, in our minds, had come to an end if she could get the Avengers back.
[...] She has a chance to get [them] back, that's a thing she would trade for."
During her memorial scene on the dock, the surviving heroes' conversation drove home
the point that the cost of the Soul Stone is a permanent one.
While there's no doubt that Black Widow will be remembered by fans for years to come, she's
gone for good except, presumably, for her upcoming movie.
While Black Widow may have ultimately been given a powerful closing to her own story,
Romanoff's death wasn't always a sure thing.
After all, movies aren't completely finished until the release date.
The shawarma end credit scene from Avengers wasn't even added until the week that the
film was released.
So it should come as no surprise that there was a lot of shifting and changing as they
went along.
One of those changes?
The events on Vormir.
Writers Markus and McFeely explained that there was a version of the script that had
Clint Barton sacrificing himself for the stone instead of Romanoff.
But when they gave the scene to the visual effects producer Jen Underdahl, she apparently
told them:
"Don't you take this away from her."
The response clearly impacted the writers, who ultimately acknowledged that it had to
be Romanoff.
It turns out that Markus and McFeely have had a working "master document" since Captain
America: Civil War, where they kept track of different things they wanted to do with
their heroes' character arcs.
It turns out that Endgame was the movie where they got to run wild.
In particular, McFeely said that they wanted to explore Marvel's tradition of "What If"
comics alternate universe presentations of Marvel events playing out differently.
The writers dove in and incorporated a bunch of "what if" scenarios right into the Endgame
plot.
The writers told The New York Times:
"Well, this is our What If?
If you lost, Thor becomes fat.
Natasha becomes a shut-in.
Steve becomes depressed.
Tony gets on with his life.
Hulk is a superhero.
[...] Clint becomes a murdering maniac."
While there were solid reasons for every character's shift in tone, there's no doubt that the writers
were happy to push the heroes out of their comfort zones for the entertainment of all.
Infinity War and Endgame may be two distinctly different movies, but the subject matter that
they handle is clearly interwoven.
This left the writers and directors constantly scrambling to figure out how to puzzle a bunch
of different pieces of storyline together in a coherent way that left them with two
distinct yet connected movies.
At one point, the plan was to have Hulk and Banner resolve their differences in Infinity
War.
However, it felt like too much of a positive in the middle of a pretty sad ending, so the
filmmakers bumped it to Endgame.
They also left out the actual transformation, banking on Scott Lang in the diner scene to
provide the right amount of confusion to help bridge the gap.
In the same vein, Hawkeye's opening scene in Endgame where he loses his family was nearly
tacked onto the end of Infinity War, but it once again felt out of place.
The biggest decision of all was where to place the Snap.
They debated putting it earlier in Infinity War, but it would have left almost nothing
for the ending.
On the other hand, if they pushed it to Endgame, it would have left the first movie with no
ending at all.
Knowing when to reverse the Snap was nearly as challenging.
Thankfully, the creative minds behind the scenes managed to eventually pull it all together
into two coherent stories.
Scott Lang was right Endgame is a time heist movie.
It wasn't the writers who came up with that one, though, but Marvel boss Kevin Feige himself.
Feige's original suggestion was to use time travel to resolve the Infinity War plot, with
the centerpiece being the Time Stone.
It wasn't until the filmmakers began fleshing things out that the Quantum Realm became the
key plot device to move the time travel element forward.
Once time travel was in the mix, there was one obvious point that had to make it into
the film: the Battle of New York.
But the writers initially felt it was too "pander-y" to head to the original Avengers
film, so they tried a ton of alternatives first.
At one point, they had Tony Stark on Asgard in a stealth suit fighting Heimdall, and the
planet Morag was originally underwater.
At another point, the Avengers stopped by Triskelion and even hopped in a car to visit
Dr. Strange.
When the rubber hit the road, though, writers and directors alike finally decided that heading
back to the Chitauri-infested streets of New York was the best option of the bunch.
The sequence in Endgame when our heroes put their heist plan to the test shows that time
travel within the MCU is distinctly different than the way it's been represented in movies
like Time Cop, Hot Tub Time Machine, or Back to the Future.
"Doc.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?"
It also establishes that Pym particles are in extremely limited supply.
Tony Stark and Steve Rogers head back on a potentially one-way trip to the '70s in the
hope of scrounging up more particles just to keep everything from falling apart.
This left fans scratching their heads when Nebula casually brought Thanos' entire planet-sized
ship and its massive army into the present.
Where on Earth did they get the impossibly huge number of particles to pull off a stunt
like that?
Joe Russo cleared up the disconnect in an interview, offering an elegantly simple solution.
When 2014 Nebula surrenders the Pym particles to her father, they aren't for him to use
to time travel; they're for scientific research.
Thanos, a genius himself, with the help of the powerful sorcerer Ebony Maw, studied the
Pym particles and then mass-produced them in order to defeat the Avengers once and for
all.
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