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

Disney Plus may have only launched yesterday, but already the brand new streaming service is offering plenty of bonus content in an effort to lure in subscribers. As one of the biggest parts of the studio’s library, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is set to play a huge role on the platform going forward, and the Mouse House have already released several deleted scenes that failed to make the final cut of Avengers: Endgame. The first offered up a different look at how the big climactic battle between the Avengers and Thanos’ army could have played out, while the other was a much more emotional scene.

13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford was originally announced to be part of Endgame’s massive ensemble, but by the time the movie hit theaters, the actress was nowhere to be seen. It was eventually revealed that she was cast as an older version of Tony Stark’s daughter Morgan, with the two sharing a moment in the Soul World after Iron Man sacrifices his own life in order to save the universe. In a new interview, directors Joe and Anthony Russo have explained why the father-and-daughter encounter was ultimately removed from the theatrical cut.

“The idea was that if we cast his daughter as an adult so that he could come to peace with what he had just done by talking to her… But, again, when we put this scene in the film, we felt that we ground the movie to a halt, and he does something similar in the next sequence when he gives his own eulogy. So, what can happen in a film this big is it feels like you just have ending after ending after ending and it just feels like the movie’s never gonna end. Then, the endings when you have too many sequences in a row, you can delete the value of each one of them.”

Anthony Russo went on to explain that putting an unfamiliar character into one of the most emotionally-charged scenes in Endgame wasn’t quite working out, despite Katherine Langford’s best efforts.

“It was sort of this idea that he’ll never know his daughter beyond this moment in time and that he can actually have an experience of her here seemed emotional and cathartic. Because this adult version of Morgan, his daughter, was never in the film and as we would watch it in post, we started to feel like we didn’t have an emotional connection to her, even though this is a wonderful actor. We didn’t have an emotional connection to the character because we’d never seen her before.”

The directors make a good point; it would have been a little jarring to have Tony reconcile with his grown-up daughter, a character that audiences who’ve followed the MCU for a decade have no emotional connection with, before minutes later showing him talking to the child-sized version of her. It was also smart to avoid loading the climax of Avengers: Endgame with too many endings, which helped the movie avoid Return of the King’s issues of dragging out the final moments of an epic blockbuster just to make sure every single character gets a sendoff of their own.