Avengers: Endgame Directors Explain Why They Cut Tony’s Afterlife Scene

At 181 minutes in length, Avengers: Endgame is a gargantuan film even before you consider those scenes that remained on the cutting room floor.

But there is one scene, in particular, that sparked some debate among Marvel fans after it leaked onto the interwebs. And we’ll give you a clue: it involves one Tony Stark.

Yes, had things panned out differently, Endgame would’ve included a poignant moment for RDJ’s fallen hero and the all-grown-up Morgan Stark, who meet within the Soul World soon after the film’s grand finale. Turns out Anthony and Joe Russo decided to cut the afterlife scene in fear of including too many endings, and via Inverse, the latter added some clarity to those comments, stating that Tony Stark’s sacrifice felt more impactful without the added Soul Stone scene.

Part of the process is we go through a long period of exploration when we make these films. That starts at the very beginning with [writers Chris] Markus and [Stephen] McFeely where we sit around and just talk about the story for months, what the possibilities are, where we can go. That sort of sense of exploration continues all the way through our shooting of the film and post-production. So there was a while where the idea was that when you use the Soul Stone there is sort of this moment that you have this kind of reckoning with something that may be left unresolved in your soul.

While it certainly would’ve been an interesting parallel to the Mad Titan’s own afterlife scene in Avengers: Infinity War, upon completing the take, the Russo Brothers quickly realized that the audience would have little-to-no connection with teenage Morgan; all their interactions with Tony Stark’s daughter were linked to the little lady played so brilliantly by Alexandra Rabe.

Joe Russo continued:

Since Thanos had that poignant experience with his daughter in Infinity War, we started playing with the idea that there was something interesting and resonant in the symmetry with Tony and his daughter. The reason we ended up moving away from it is, once we shot it, we began to understand as we were actually shooting it, is that the audience didn’t have a relationship with his adult daughter in the film. They had a relationship with his young daughter but not with his adult daughter. It didn’t feel like it was as powerful as we may have thought so we began to move away from it.

It certainly makes sense, too; even when watching the incomplete deleted scene (in terms of CGI, at least), something about Robert Downey Jr.’s interaction with teenage Morgan felt a little… off. One thing’s for sure: the two stars didn’t have half the chemistry shared between RDJ and Rabe (we love you 3,000!), so it should come as no surprise that the aforementioned deleted scene was sentenced to the floor of the editing room.

Avengers: Endgame is now available across all the usual platforms.