Even at three hours long, Avengers: Endgame still didn’t have the chance to give every major member of the cast something important to do, which is to be expected when the conclusion to the Infinity Saga had rounded up perhaps the most star-studded ensemble ever gathered on the big screen. It was smart storytelling on the filmmakers’ part to use the Snap in order to focus the majority of the plot on the original lineup of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, because if the entire roster had been around then the movie would have lost an awful lot of focus.
There were even some characters left on the cutting room floor, including actress Katherine Langford as an older version of Morgan Stark, while the final scene at Tony Stark’s funeral featured some big names showing up for a brief second without even saying a word. With so many heroes in the mix, you can understand why adding even more cameos into Endgame wasn’t a top priority, even though it deprived audiences of the chance to see a fan favorite Die Hard actor make his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut.
The theatrical re-release of the movie included the addition of an unfinished bonus scene that saw the Hulk rescue people trapped inside a burning building, and co-writer Christopher Markus recently admitted that Reginald VelJohnson, who played Sergeant Al Powell in Die Hard and its sequel, portrayed a member of the fire department grateful for Bruce Banner’s help.
Everybody loves Die Hard, but VelJohnson’s brief appearance as a uniformed character employed by the city positioned outside of a burning high-rise building would have been a little too on-the nose and meta for the MCU, especially in a movie like Avengers: Endgame, which needed to be laser-focused on trying to bring over a decade’s worth of storytelling to a satisfying conclusion.
