As the culmination of over a decade’s worth of big screen storytelling, the mere fact that Avengers: Endgame turned out as well as it did is nothing less than an incredible achievement in filmmaking. While it may stand little chance in the running for the high-profile statues at next year’s Academy Awards, the highest-grossing movie in history is nonetheless one of the most impressive blockbusters ever made from both a narrative and technical standpoint.
This won’t exactly be breaking news to fans that have diligently followed the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the very beginning, but when it comes to a movie like Endgame, that has to weave in story threads established over twenty-one previous installments, directors Joe and Anthony Russo faced a monumental task in making sure all of the moving parts that began with Iron Man in 2008 continued moving in sync right up until the end credits.
The duo had a lot of ground to cover in ensuring that Endgame hit all of the right emotional and narrative beats, and a new deleted scene (up above) has been doing the rounds online that shows just how fluid the process actually was.
It’s far from the best quality and comes from a recording off of Disney Plus, where you can now watch it for yourself, but as you can see, the deleted scene has a huge number of differences from the finished version that hit theaters earlier this year. Once you manage to ignore how ridiculous it looks to see the Avengers engaging in their universe-deciding final stand without the aid of finished CGI, there are a ton of interactions between characters that were lost by the time the movie left the editing suite.
It’s massively interesting to see just one of the many variations on how this scene played out, with some sequences not too far away from what we saw in the finished product, while others like the argumentative showdown between Tony Stark and Doctor Strange taking on a whole new meaning now that we know Iron Man’s final moments played out during Avengers: Endgame‘s emotionally-charged climax.
