Marvel Studios
While Avengers: Endgame was ultimately able to stick its landing and become literally the most successful film of all-time, there was no doubt that prior to the release, Marvel Studios was probably feeling some serious pressure about whether or not they’d be able to live up to the unprecedented hype.
Not that we doubted them — most fans knew the movie would be a banger — but considering it was potentially the most anticipated film in the history of cinema, there’s always going to be a natural level of pressure when it comes to those sort of lofty expectations.
Warning: spoilers for Avengers: Endgame will follow.
As we now know, not only was Avengers: Endgame fantastic, but it was also genuinely surprising, which is a difficult feat in the age of Twitter thread theories and Sub-Reddits. And one of those major surprises — killing off the film’s main antagonist in the first 15 minutes — was not necessarily always the plan.
Speaking to Comic Book, Endgame executive producer Trinh Tran revealed why the writer’s room decided to literally cut the head off the snake that is Thanos in the first 15 minutes of the film.
“I remember sitting in that conference room and we have spent weeks on end trying to figure out where his character goes in this movie. We were just struggling and struggling and just kept circling back and couldn’t quite figure out Thanos’ journey.”
“It’s like, ‘He defeated the Avengers in Infinity War. Where does he go from there? How do we continue a story where audiences are going to go, ‘Oh, this is new, this is different,’ rather than just tell the same story again?’ We wanted our heroes to be able to go back in time, like that’s the fun of it, right?”
“So I just went, ‘OK, this is a crazy idea. They’re probably going to think I’m nuts for saying it, but let’s talk about it.’ I just blurted it out and it’s like, ‘OK, what happens if we do kill him?’
“It led to a lot of fun conversations that we had about, ‘Well, then, how are they going to get all the stones back if he’s destroyed and he’s killed?’ And, and so the movie and that moment ended up being in there.”
Sure, it could be that… or — as Honest Trailers so aptly pointed out — they simply wrote themselves into a corner and had to play franchise filmmaking’s traditional get-out-of-jail card: time travel!