“Avengers: Endgame” writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely took the Hall H stage at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday morning and delivered a fascinating story of a particularly upsetting idea they had for the third act of “Endgame.”
This idea involved the story of what the 2014 version of Thanos (Josh Brolin) did while the 2014 Nebula took the present-day Nebula’s place and snuck back to the future with the other Avengers. Before Nebula messed with Tony Stark’s time machine to drag Thanos and his armies in the future, Thanos would go on a final crusade before the last battle that we saw at the end of “Endgame.”
And what he did would have been crazy.
“We were working on different ways to bring Thanos into the present day because we had killed the present-day Thanos but we had activated the past Thanos,” Markus said in describing the unused concept. “And in one, knowing it would take his Nebula some time to go rejigger the time machine to bring him back — so he went down to his present-day Earth, which was 2014, and wiped it out and killed the Avengers. And then Nebula would turn on the time machine and he would walk through with the Avenger he had killed and go, ‘I killed you. What are you gonna do about it?’”
That Avenger? Captain America. Yes, you’re reading that right — they were definitely thinking about having the 2014 Thanos introduce himself to the present-day Avengers by chucking Captain America’s head at them.
It’s probably for the best that they didn’t go that route — aside from just being a horrifying concept — that would probably introduce a lot of time weirdness, especially since “Avengers: Endgame” is already filled with messy time travel logic and maybe would have compounded that. Maybe. I’ll admit I haven’t had time yet to ponder the ramifications of that idea just yet.
But it’s certainly a fun thing to think about.
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