Joe and Anthony Russo whipped up a ton of news to cap off the week, which is no surprise considering the Avengers: Endgame co-directors were on hand for a panel Friday at Comic-Con and revealed a number of juicy insights about what’s now the second-biggest movie of all time. Like, for starters, the script at one point involved Thanos cutting off Captain America’s head.
The brothers revealed the gory almost-plot point after stopping by Entertainment Weekly’s Comic-Con video studio for a conversation about the movie, which was also the gist of their panel appearance.
Here’s the deal: They were originally thinking that late in the movie, the version of Thanos from the past would not only have killed all of the Avengers, but he would show up in the present and lob the head of Captain America himself at the current Avengers’ feet after he’d cut it off.
It seems the Russos desperately wanted that in the movie, holding on to the idea for quite a long time because they wanted the visual of Thanos materializing through a portal with Cap’s severed head. After laying out that dark plot element that was thankfully left out of the finished version, the brothers also pushed back in their chat with EW about how that would have been too brutal a twist for viewers. “Thanos is a rough dude,” Anthony Russo countered.
During an earlier panel on Friday (“Writing Angers: Endgame”) which featured screenwriters/producers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Markus had more to say about the horrifying plot element that ended up getting discarded.
For this ultimately unused turn of events, Thanos would have gone “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?’” ‘The Avenger,’ as we said, was a reference to Captain America, though this fascinating twist would certainly have been an upsetting way for him to go out.
