Avengers: Endgame might be the second-highest grossing film of all-time, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t creative differences during the production of the film, as the Russo Brothers have revealed Jon Favreau’s original distaste for a major scene.
The culmination of 11 years of films and many hours of character arcs coming full circle, Endgame was celebrated by critics and fans alike for how it wrapped up the most financially successful film franchise of all time. But the director of Iron Man and Iron Man 2, and long-time Marvel Cinematic Universe producer, Favreau, disclosed how he was originally against the film’s ending.
After the “snap” is undone by Hulk and Thanos’ army attacks Earth, it’s left to the man who started the MCU to defeat the big enemy. Step forward Tony Stark. Sacrificing himself to save the universe, Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo got a lot of pushback originally from Favreau.
The Russos “did not want to fuck up” the last line of the iconic character, they told Vanity Fair, and said even more pressure around that came from Favreau.
Joe Russo: “I dunno if we’ve told this story in its entirety… It’s probably the most pressure we’ve ever had in, in trying to come up with a line with Markus, McFeely in any of these movies. You do not want to fuck up Tony Stark’s last line.”
Anthony Russo: “Part of the pressure came from Jon Favreau, who called us up after he read the script… and said to us, ‘are you really going to kill Iron Man?”
JR: “He did. Yeah. And I remember pacing on the corner of a stage on the phone with Favreau trying to talk him off a ledge. ‘Cause he’s like, ‘You can’t do this. It’s gonna devastate people and you don’t want them you know, walking out of the theater and into traffic.’ We did it anyways.”
AR: “Yeah, we did it anyway. And, and to Jon’s credit, he hadn’t stepped through the process in the way that we had. So we would’ve had the same reaction if somebody had dropped that.”
Iron Man’s death is possibly one of the most important and well-known movie scenes of all-time, and has helped define the the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the years since. Truthfully, there was no other fitting end for Stark; as George Lucas often said about writing character arcs, it’s “like poetry, it rhymes”.
Avengers: Endgame is available to stream on Disney Plus.