If you were one of the millions of Marvel fans in the early screenings of “Avengers: Endgame,” it’s an understatement to say there were multiple moments of pure emotion, especially during the deaths of characters such as Black Widow and, obviously, Iron Man. But according to the Russo Brothers, the filmmakers behind the superhero epic, there were discussions that would have led to several more massive deaths in the film.
Speaking on the Happy. Sad. Confused. podcast, Joe and Anthony Russo talked about some of the original pitches for how the story of “Avengers: Endgame” might go. And at one point, Marvel Studios boss, Kevin Feige, pitched the idea of not only killing Black Widow and Iron Man, but actually killing all of the original Avengers characters, including Captain America, Thor, Hawkeye, and Hulk.
“Kevin did actually pitch at one point taking all the OGs off the board,” Joe Russo said. “We thought it was way too aggressive and that the audience wouldn’t be able to process it, and that in fact picking one or two characters to make sacrifices throughout the movie might give you moments throughout the film where the action could stop and you could have emotional catharsis and then continue with the narrative and then have more emotional catharsis.”
“That was early days,” Anthony Russo added. “It wasn’t like there was ever a script or anything that had that in it.”
Apparently, Feige was looking at another Disney property as the inspiration for how to land the emotion of killing all the original heroes in ‘Endgame.’
Joe Russo said, “Kevin early on had pitched this idea that it was like ‘Toy Story 3’ where they should all actually jump into the fire in order to save the universe, and we thought you have to step out storytelling on something of this scale, so we weren’t quite sure how the math would add up to get to that.”
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Obviously, plans changed and many of the heroes did actually survive, with Captain America, aka Steve Rogers, getting his own send-off without dying, Thor living on to fight another day (in his fourth movie, ‘Love & Thunder’), Hawkeye getting a Disney+ TV show, and Hulk showing up in ‘Shang-Chi’ and the upcoming “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” So, at least from a content perspective, Feige is probably happy the Russos fought back against the idea of wiping out all of those characters.