Disney Plus recently launched with Avengers: Endgame as part of its initial line-up and alongside it were new deleted scenes not included in the previous home release (which seems a little tight-fisted of Disney, but whatever). One of the most interesting was a scene that’d have followed Tony Stark’s death, featuring him meeting his daughter as an adult in the afterlife. Now played by Katherine Langford, she assures him that his sacrifice wasn’t in vain and that everything worked out alright.
It’s easy to see it was removed, as it’s kind of cheesy, doesn’t make a great deal of sense and under-cuts Stark’s sacrifice. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo recently explained though exactly why they left it on the editing room floor, saying:
“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.  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.”
The notion that using the Soul Stone gives you a window into unresolved issues you have is an interesting one, but I don’t think introducing a new actor as Morgan Stark right at the end of the movie is the way to go about it. As they identify, we don’t know this person and it’s too late in the narrative to begin establishing new cast members.
The second deleted scene is a variant on what Black Widow and Hawkeye have to go through on Vormir. In the theatrical cut, they have a rather lonely experience, but in the deleted sequence we see them battling Thanos’ henchmen. Here’s why they went with the former:
“We wanted to make it Black Widow’s final test with Hawkeye, a character who she’s been so close to, but the cuts all of a sudden became between them and a bunch of Thanos’ minions, who we didn’t have any relationship with.
So we started talking about it in post-production with our editor Jeff Ford. We started spitballing: Isn’t the best version of this scene Hawkeye versus black widow? We have two heroes, neither of whom is gonna let the other die? They both know they have a mission that involves one of them sacrificing themselves and these characters had such a rich relationship throughout the MCU. So why don’t we just make the conflict between these two characters?”
That makes sense to me. In fact, all of the deleted Avengers: Endgame scenes I’ve seen were cut for very good reasons, but nonetheless, it’s always nice to see what could have been, right?
