Now that Avengers: Endgame has officially conquered the all-time box office record, Disney has set its sights on dominating the home video market. To build hype around its July 30th digital debut and next month’s Blu-ray release, Marvel has been dropping all sorts of behind the scenes featurettes and much ballyhooed deleted scenes. In fact, just this morning, another cut scene made its way online, and though it’s shorter on emotion, it’s still big on laughs.
The scene – which you can watch up above – finds Rocket studying news footage of the big Chitauri battle at the end of the first Avengers movie, questioning why it took so long for the original six heroes to take down the alien army when they could’ve just blown up the mother ship. After Steve Rogers earnestly reveals that they didn’t realize they could do that, Rocket laughs so hard that Tony takes it upon himself to shut the little creature up.
On top of garnering a laugh or two, the scene seems to be a deliberate dig at the first film’s often-criticized “Keystone Army” trope, as the large amount of Chitauri forces are all instantly defeated by simply taking out their battle station. While it conveniently wraps up the big battle, it’s still one of the weakest aspects of one of Marvel’s best movies, so it’s nice to see that the studio isn’t too self-serious to critique itself.
Within the story, however, the supposed weakness of the Chitauri also sheds light on Thanos’ original underestimation of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, giving Loki “the suckiest army in the galaxy” in order to retrieve the Space Stone. Although, considering the Asgardians seem wise to the ways of the Cosmos, it certainly raises eyebrows that neither Thor nor his brother knew this ahead of time.
Of course, this deleted scene is just one of the many, many supplements included on the Avengers: Endgame home video release, which hits digital at the end of the month and Blu-ray shelves on Tuesday, August 13th. Considering every feature we’ve seen so far has had some effect on our understanding of the MCU’s past and future, this may be a release worth owning for yourself.
