Avengers: Endgame is tasked with bringing the first eleven years of the MCU to their point of culmination, while also laying the groundwork for whatever’s next in the superhero saga. It therefore goes without saying that a lot of importance is being placed on how the Avengers: Infinity War sequel will conclude, and in an interview with Collider, directors Anthony and Joe Russo offered a few insights.
Of course, given the ongoing secrecy around this month’s release, there was never a chance that the brothers would offer any actual details about how the movie wraps things up. Still, they did recall how even before the rest of the plot was written, the film’s ending was very much treated as the, ahem, endgame:
“When we were working on both Infinity War and Endgame, the first thing we did was break the ending of Endgame. Because we wanted to know where we were going. It’s very hard to tell a story if you don’t know where you’re going.
“So we have a very specific process with [writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely] where we spent months in a room just talking about a three-page outline. Literally, page one is act one, page two is act two, page three is act three. Because you have to know in a contained document like that, ‘Here’s where we start, here’s what happens in the middle, here’s where it ends.’ If you know that, it’s a lot easier to get to script. A more malleable format to work in a short outline like that, spend your time talking about it and thinking it through. We knew fairly early on how this was gonna’ end.”
The filmmakers went on to explain how they don’t really take into account audience reactions when crafting a story, but instead consider their own personal responses to the drama:
“For as much as we love the audience—and we do really love the audience, one of our favorite things about being filmmakers is experiencing a movie that we made with the audience—we don’t really think about the audience while we’re crafting a story. We generally only think about our own reaction to the story we’re telling. We use that as our meter for the choices we should make, in terms of how we structure the story, where we spend time, where we don’t spend time. I would say that, in general…it’s really our tastes and our emotional reaction that we’re having is what guides us through it.”
So far, the approach seems to have fared exceptionally well with filmgoers. The genocidal conclusion of Infinity War, for instance, just might have been the most talked about movie sequence of 2018, and with the upcoming sequel, the Russo Brothers will be showing us how Earth’s Mightiest Heroes go about reversing the infamous snap.
Along the way, it looks like Avengers: Endgame is wrapping up the arcs of several Phase 1 heroes, be it by sending them into retirement or giving them a heroic death. By the end of the movie, we can expect the MCU to be a very different place, but we’ll find out what sort of world the Russos have left for Marvel’s next era when the film hits theaters on April 26th.
