As you would expect from a movie that tied up over a decade’s worth of storytelling in the space of three hours, the script for Avengers: Endgame went through a number of drafts in an attempt to make sure that all of the many moving parts ended up working correctly. For the most part fans were pleased with how the narrative turned out, bar the usual nitpicking that comes with any movie that involves time travel, but one of the most memorable scenes in Endgame almost didn’t happen, with one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes sent to an entirely different dimension instead.
Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed that in the earliest draft of the script, the entire segment set around the original Avengers movie in 2012 wasn’t even part of it, and Tony Stark was set to suit up and head to Asgard in an attempt to retrieve the Tesseract from Odin’s vault.
“We tried one that just wasn’t that interesting in our first draft, and that’s how we ended up going to The Avengers and Stark Tower and all that. But we had a couple good things. It was basically going to Asgard in a different way because the Space Stone was technically in a vault there, so Tony Stark was wearing a stealth suit. But of course Heimdall could see him, so Heimdall’s fighting an invisible Tony Stark while Thor’s doing something else. And it was just like, ‘Why don’t we go to The Avengers?'”
While it would have been admittedly cool to see Iron Man in Asgard, especially if it would have included him facing off against Idris Elba’s Heimdall, Markus and McFeely made the right choice in choosing to revisit the Battle of New York from the first Avengers. The jump back to 2012 made great use of the time travel concept, and allowing Thor to head to Asgard later in the movie gave the God of Thunder the chance to reconnect with his mother, as well as furthering the emotional journey that his character was on during the course of Avengers: Endgame.