Warning: Contains Spoilers
For those of you who have seen Avengers: Endgame – and let’s face it, that’s pretty much all of you – I’d put money on the fact that you were blown away by the final battle sequence.
If you don’t want spoilers, I’m giving you fair warning that this article contains a fair few of them so it’s on you if you continue reading. That’s all I’m saying.
Right, back to business. The Avengers and pretty much every other superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe donned their onesies and squared off against Thanos during the epic battle, which I thought couldn’t get much better.
Endgame’s writers have since confirmed that an even longer battle was written and filmed though, suggesting that the scene could have been that bit more awe-inspiring.
Or not, because writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely admitted the deleted scenes just ‘didn’t play well’ – hence why they didn’t make the final cut.
In an interview with The New York Times, Markus and McFeely said:
We wrote and shot an even longer battle with its own three-act structure.
The writers also confirmed that Marvel knew all along that nearly every character from the franchise would be involved in the battle, admitting it took 200 days to shoot the two movies, Infinity War and Endgame.
Giving even more insight into the deleted scenes, McFeely added the battle sequence initially got paused midway through – but this didn’t work for a number of reasons.
The writer said:
It didn’t play well. 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.
The scene also didn’t work because, as Markus notes, it ‘required them to find enough shelter to have a conversation in the middle of the biggest battle’. Which, y’know, definitely wouldn’t have worked.
I don’t know about you guys but I need to see those deleted scenes. ASAP. Maybe we should start a petition for the Russo brothers to release them for us?!
Surely they’ll agree with us that three hours just wasn’t long enough and we need more.
You can watch Avengers:Endgame in cinemas now.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).