As the culmination of over a decade of superhero cinema, it was pretty much required that Avengers: Endgame went big for its climax. And in its final third, the Avengers: Infinity War sequel did just that, delivering a massive all-star melee that kept finding new ways to leave the average MCU fan squeeing in their seat.
In an interview with The New York Times, co-writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus reflected on this set piece, recalling how they “wrote and shot an even much longer battle, with its own three-act structure.” Specifically, McFeely explained that the movie was going to offer a momentary break from all the chaos as the team planned their next moves:
“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.’ ‘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 then added that they couldn’t find a convincing way to insert such a conversation into the battle:
“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.”
Another moment that they considered cutting was the scene where all the female heroes band together. According to McFeely, there were concerns that the sequence would come across as pandering:
“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.”
Finally, Markus went to argue that the Avengers movies are all about watching these characters from different corners of the MCU interact and work together:
“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.”
There’s been talk for a while about the possibility of an all-female team-up movie. And while we’ve yet to see evidence that Marvel has such a project in development, Captain Marvel actress Brie Larson reaffirmed her support for the idea over the weekend.
Either way, now that Avengers: Endgame is in theaters, it’s unclear what to expect from the next big crossover movie, though we can probably assume that Marvel’s Phase 4 is building up to some kind of Avengers-style event. Hopefully, the studio can offer some clarification in the coming months, but first, Spider-Man: Far From Home is set to wrap up Phase 3 when it arrives in theaters on July 2nd.