Call it pandering, or one of the defining moments from Marvel’s Infinity Saga, but the A-Force scene in Avengers: Endgame is pretty damn special.
It occurs amid the sensory overload that is Endgame‘s final act – specifically after Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel seizes control of the Infinity Gauntlet and spearheads a full-front assault into enemy territory. While brief, it’s already fueled all sorts of fan theories and speculation about a possible A-Force spinoff movie taking flight in the not-so-distant future.
In fact, Larson and her co-stars have all pitched the idea to Marvel chief Kevin Feige, so we imagine it’s really a question of when, rather than if, that A-Force movie will materialize. As for the scene itself, according to Senior Visual Development Artist Jackson Sze, Avengers: Endgame almost featured a very different display of girl power.
Via The Art of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame:
Captain Marvel, being intergalactically powerful, would help take care of Thanos’ ship, which at this point is just shooting blasts down onto the battlefield and making things really difficult for everyone, and she gets shot down on the ground. Pepper Potts, in her Rescue suit, sees that, rushes to her, and tries to protect her from another blast from the ship. So she raises her shield-protection powers and, as she’s getting bombarded, calls to all the female Avengers to come help, and they all jump in around Captain Marvel in a circle… and they’re all trying to fight off the Outriders and protect her. Eventually, she comes to, realizes what’s happening, thanks everyone, and then powers up full Binary. Pepper just goes, ‘Do your thing, Captain.’ And then she zooms into space and shoots through all the fighters and goes in and wrecks the big ship just like she does in the movie, taking the whole thing down.
This, coupled with recent revelations about Earth’s Mightiest Heroes falling back to a nearby trench, indicate that the Avengers: Endgame finale was almost very different to the one that ended up on film. Nevertheless, the epic battle was so well orchestrated that one small change may well have affected the pacing – or, at the very least undermined a particular character highlight – so perhaps it’s for the best that Marvel stuck to their original idea when it came to assembling A-Force.
Avengers: Endgame closed the book on Marvel’s Infinity Saga – but not before Spider-Man: Far From Home swung by for a much-needed epilogue. Up next? The standalone Black Widow movie, which looks set to wind the clock back to MCU Phase (shortly after Marvel’s Civil War) for a globe-trotting adventure involving espionage, Russian agents, and a sharp-shooting nemesis.