An eagle-eyed fan spotted that a character from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. almost made a very brief appearance in Avengers: Endgame. The scene, had it been used, would have been a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenario, but has since been made available thanks to the VFX studio, Cantina Creative.
The VFX studio teamed with Marvel to create the VFX solutions for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, posting on its website some of the work that we came to see in the film but also some ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, which is where we find this tiny little crossover. The studio created graphics for the time heist scenes from Endgame, showing the stones, where they were, and who had been in contact with them.
In one of these graphics, the actor Reed Diamond can be seen in his role as Werner Reinhardt, alongside Zola and Red Skull. They place him next to the Tesseract, or Space Stone, which is one of the first stones that made an appearance in the MCU and was aimed to be weaponized by HYDRA and Red Skull.
Diamond played Reinhardt in 10 episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. from 2014-2015, and then again in 2018. He is a disciple of HYDRA founder Red Skull and continues the group’s work after the latter’s apparent death, becoming a primary antagonist. Reinhardt, going by the alias Daniel Whitehall, becomes one of the show’s most dangerous villains and eventually meets his end at the hands of Agent Phil Coulson.
So “crossover” may be a strong word to use for a simple image on a screen, but it is a nice nod to the huge universe that is the MCU by including these characters from the spin-off TV series.
