Avengers: Endgame brings back numerous familiar faces from MCU past thanks to the heroes’ use of time travel. In-universe, the method of jumping back into their own personal histories is the only way to retrieve the Infinity Stones but, out of it, it’s an excuse to get all nostalgic about how far the franchise has come in 10 years and to invite some old friends back for the farewell party.
It’s interesting, then, to hear that another fan favorite could have shown his face in the movie. We all miss Idris Elba’s Heimdall, who was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, and it turns out the first draft of Endgame would have given us another appearance from the Asgardian gatekeeper.
Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed in an interview with NY Times that originally, Tony Stark was supposed to join Thor and Rocket on Asgard in 2013 to pinch the Space Stone (it was there during the events of Thor: The Dark World, remember?). This would have led to a cool-sounding sequence of an invisible Iron Man battling Heimdall.
“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 that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him.”
This scene was eventually changed when it was decided that revisiting 2012’s The Avengers made so much sense as three of the six Stones were in New York at this time, and so Tony’s role in the Time Heist became helping Ant-Man swipe the Space Stone from his past self.
That was a fun sequence in itself – and ended up giving us hope that Loki’s alive again – but I think it’s fair to say a lot of fans wish we could’ve seen the alternate version of Avengers: Endgame that’s somewhere out there in the Multiverse with this Iron Man/Heimdall battle. Anybody got any spare Pym Particles so we can hop through the Quantum Realm?