Avengers: Endgame Directors Explain Why Black Panther Was The First To Return After The Snap

Avengers: Endgame is now available on home video just weeks after it became the highest-grossing movie in history, and the epic conclusion to the Infinity Saga continues to dominate the cultural conversation almost four months after it was first released. With people now able to view Endgame at home anytime they like, fans are going to re-watch the movie countless times and analyze any new details they can get their hands on.

As one of the most highly-anticipated pics ever made, the Infinity War sequel was under intense scrutiny from the very beginning as it not only had to tie up over a decade’s worth of storytelling in a satisfying fashion, but also deliver the scale and spectacle demanded from a blockbuster burdened with sky-high expectations. The climactic third battle in particular must have caused a few headaches or two given the sheer number of characters and returns involved, a sentiment echoed by co-writer Stephen McFeely on Endgame’s audio commentary track:

“Just on an act-construction level, we were faced with a strange problem where we needed two snaps of the Gauntlet and asked ourselves often; ‘what does it mean to bring everybody back?’ and ‘what is the best way to do that?’ We certainly tried a version where everyone came back and you knew it immediately, and there they were. Maybe they all came back to wherever you wished them to come back.”

When all of the dusted Avengers return to the battlefield, the first person who gets their ‘hero close-up’ is Black Panther. In a recent Reddit AMA, the Russo brothers revealed why the King of Wakanda was chosen for this particular honor, saying:

“We spent a lot of time in the edit room playing around with the sequencing of the portals. We probably didn’t lock that section of the movie until about a month before the film was in theaters. We always wanted Sam to be the first one to communicate with Cap via his comm and Sam was last in Wakanda, so logically the first portal that would open would be the Wakandan portal. And the first person that would logically walk through a portal from Wakanda would be the king himself, bringing his army once again to the defense of Cap and the world.”

There it is; nothing groundbreaking or exciting, but a matter of logic and logistics. While the answer may not be what some fans were hoping for, the team behind Avengers: Endgame should nonetheless be commended for taking such a reasoned and sensible approach to setting up a third-act battle between superheroes and time-traveling aliens.