Marvel's culmination of a 22-movie journey is so long it's hard to imagine that anything
got left on the cutting room floor or tossed into the writers' room wastebasket.
Yet there's plenty of stuff that didn't make it on screen - here are some planned or even
filmed scenes that didn't end up in Avengers: Endgame.
Tony Stark's other daughter
In October 2018, Marvel announced that Katherine Langford - star of the controversial Netflix
drama 13 Reasons Why - shot some scenes for the final Avengers installment.
Who exactly she portrayed was kept secret so as to reveal as little about the plot of
the movie as possible.
But fans were left hanging when they actually saw Endgame, because Langford was nowhere
to be found.
Only after half of the world saw the movie did directors Anthony and Joe Russo reveal
that Langford had been hired to play an older version of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts' young
daughter, Morgan.
The Russos shot a dreamlike scene - which would have mirrored the one featuring Thanos
and Gamora from Infinity War - in which Tony would've met the young adult version of Morgan,
portrayed by Langford.
Joe Russo explained the idea for the axed scene in an interview with the Happy Sad Confused
podcast a few weeks after Endgame premiered:
"The intention was that his future daughter - because these are the stones we're dealing
with, and they're magic - his future daughter forgave him and sort of gave him peace to
go."
The scene got cut, however, because we'd never actually seen this version of Morgan, and
it was just too much in a movie as overstuffed as Avengers: Endgame:
"We showed it to test audiences and it was really confusing."
Even more fighting
The climactic battle of Avengers: Endgame is one of the most complicated superhero slugfests
ever put to film.
After Thanos violently confronts the Avengers to reclaim his Infinity Stones, nearly every
living hero in the vast Marvel universe comes together to defeat the Mad Titan once and
for all.
The sequence is as long as it is ambitious, taking up most of the final third of the movie.
But if the screenwriters' initial plans had come to fruition, that fight for the ages
could've been bigger.
According to a New York Times interview with the movie's co-writers, Christopher Markus
and Stephen McFeely, the battle itself would've had a three-act structure all its own.
But when all was said and done, it was overkill.
Case in point, among the cuts was a scene-within-the-scene, falling during a three-minute ceasefire.
McFeely explained that one:
"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’s 18 people all going, 'What are we
going to do?'
'I’m going to do this.'
Just bouncing around this completely fake, fraudulent scene."
Trailer travails
Avengers: Endgame was a highly anticipated movie, which left Marvel Studios in a tricky
predicament.
How could it promote the movie with trailers and not give away anything that hinted at
a spoiler?
Co-director Joe Russo explained the predicament to the Happy Sad Confused podcast way back
in May of 2018, after Avengers: Infinity War had debuted:
"We use all the materials that we have at our disposal to create a trailer"
"Audiences are so predictive now that you have to be very smart about how you craft
a trailer because an audience can watch a trailer and basically tell you what's gonna
happen in the film."
So when it came to Endgame, that meant using whatever non-offending footage they had, which
by necessity included shots the Russos knew would not appear in the theatrical cut of
Endgame.
Among those scenes is this sequence of Black Widow training for a big fight by rapidly
unloading a firearm at a shooting range.
Considering that Black Widow's major contribution to the plot's outcome has little to do with
her marksmanship, it's safe to say that this footage just had no place in the final film.
Now, speaking of Black Widow...
The trip to Vormir could've gone differently
While Avengers: Endgame scored high marks with critics and audiences, one of the major
qualms fans have is the way in which Black Widow makes her final exit.
When Black Widow and Hawkeye head to the planet Vormir to nab the Soul Stone, they learn that
one of the two must die to get it.
Natasha makes the ultimate sacrifice, diving off a cliff to her demise.
According to screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely in the New York Times,
they first wrote the scene the other way.
Said McFeely:
"Jen Underdahl, our visual effects producer, read an outline or draft where Hawkeye goes
over.
And she goes, 'Don't you take this away from her.'"
It was Natasha's heroic moment, in other words, and to have Hawkeye die wouldn't have made
the same impact.
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