Avengers: Endgame writers break silence about movie's major story arc
Note: This article contains spoilers about Avengers: Endgame.
Avengers: Endgame followed the surviving heroes as they attempted to undo Thanos' devastating snap which wiped out half of the universe. And that journey took them to some interesting places.
Thanks to Ant-Man, the Avengers time travelled back to key moments in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to obtain the six Infinity Stones and create their own Infinity Gauntlet.
So how did time travel come about in the writers' room?
Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explained that producer Kevin Feige was the first person to float the idea of using time "as an element", and that's when they decided to make use of Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm to bring the concept to life.
McFeely and Markus then opened up about why the movie made it clear that altering the past does not change the present.
"It was by necessity," McFeely said. "If you have six MacGuffins and every time you go back it changes something, you've got Biff's casino [in Back to the Future Part II], exponentially. So we just couldn't do that.
"We had physicists come in – more than one – who said, basically, Back to the Future is [wrong]."
The duo also discussed several ideas that they had in mind during the drafting stage and ultimately didn't make the cut.
Interestingly, they weren't originally planning on going back to the first Avengers movie like in the final version of Endgame.
"We went back to Asgard," McFeely said. "There's a moment in the MCU, if you're paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault.
"In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him."
Markus added: "Thor had long scenes with Natalie Portman.
"There were entirely other trips taken. They went to the Triskelion at one point to get the [Tesseract], and then somebody was going to get into a car and drive to Doctor Strange's house.
"It was when we were trying to avoid going to Avengers because it seemed pander-y."
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Avengers: Endgame is out now.
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