Jane Foster’s cameo in Avengers: Endgame is so fleeting that Natalie Portman didn’t even need to film any new scenes for it. Instead, the Avengers: Infinity War sequel takes footage from 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, though Portman was still called in to do a little voice work. In an interview with The New York Times, however, Endgame co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed that the first draft of the script gave a much bigger role to Thor’s old flame.
As those who’ve seen the film will know (and if you haven’t, then consider this a spoiler warning), Earth’s Mightiest Heroes start their snap-reversal mission by journeying to New York in 2012, Asgard in 2013 and Morag in 2014. When writing the first draft, however, McFeely and Markus felt that revisiting the Battle of New York was too “pander-y” and “obvious.” With that in mind, the mission to retrieve the Tesseract was moved to Asgard, with McFeely explaining the setup as follows:
“In the first draft, we didn’t go back to the [original] ‘Avengers’ movie. We went back to Asgard. But there’s a moment in the M.C.U., if you’re paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault.”
In this version of the story, Markus said that Thor “had long scenes with Natalie Portman,” which sounds like a pretty awkward exchange, seeing how the God of Thunder comes to Jane from a future where the two of them have broken up.
The Asgard section was also going to feature Iron Man in a stealth suit that granted him invisibility. The only one who could detect Tony Stark was apparently the all-seeing Heimdall, leading the two to fight it out.
Regardless, Markus and McFeely eventually decided to scrap these plans, and arrived at the combination of characters, stones and locations that you see in the final film. But given Avengers: Endgame’s emphasis on alternate timelines, perhaps it’s all too fitting that we’re now left contemplating what might’ve been.
