Jane Foster’s cameo in Avengers: Endgame was so brief that Natalie Portman wasn’t even required to shoot any new scenes for it. Instead, the filmmakers just used old footage from 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, with the actress coming in to do a little voice work to complete it. At one point, though, the character was going to have a lot more screen time, even finding herself reuniting with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.
Speaking at SDCC over the summer, Endgame co-writer Christopher Markus explained the thinking behind the scene and why it was ultimately scrapped, saying:
“Once we figured out the sort of track we wanted Thor to be on, that he was really going to crumble — as any of us would, probably — that the only person who could put him together [would be Frigga]. We wrote a scene with him and Jane, but Jane isn’t the person to put him back together. Odin is not the person to put him back together. Really, it only is his mother.”
After deciding that Thor would share the screen with Frigga instead, the reunion with Jane was removed from the script for the sake of pacing, with Markus saying:
“[W]e couldn’t have him run, get the stone, then go talk to his mom — it would take a disproportionately amount of time. Plus, we never know how the Aether turns into a stone, no one’s ever seen it happen, it just happens.”
And while this scene wasn’t ever committed to film, we do now have a look at what it could’ve been like thanks to Avengers: Endgame – The Art of the Movie, a book that’s been the source of a lot of juicy reveals lately. Down in the gallery below, you can see an animatic which depicts the would be reunion and how it may have played out had they kept it in the movie.
Interesting, right? It’s certainly a shame they had to cut this in the end, but Markus’ reasoning above is definitely sound and besides, even though Jane’s role in Avengers: Endgame was pretty small, Marvel still has big plans for Portman.
She’s set to headline Thor: Love and Thunder as the female Thor when it hits theaters on November 5th, 2021, while it’s also been said that she could appear alongside Brie Larson in Captain Marvel 2. In short, there’s a whole lot of Jane to look forward to in the years to come and as such, we can easily forgive the studio for keeping her cameo in the aforementioned Infinity War sequel so minimal.
