The first half of Avengers: Endgame saw Tony Stark settled into a life of quiet retirement with his wife Pepper and his daughter Morgan, but thanks to the film’s five-year time-jump, the Avengers: Infinity War sequel managed to skip both Iron Man’s wedding and Pepper’s pregnancy.
Given how long fans have been invested in Tony’s relationship with Pepper, some may have been a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see some of the biggest milestones in the couple’s journey together. In a recent interview with Backstory Magazine, however, co-writer Christopher Markus defended these omissions, explaining that they were more interested in showing the domestic life that Tony had settled into than how he got there:
“We wanted to see the long-term effects. I don’t think anybody needed to see the proposal and the wedding and the pregnancy of Pepper Potts. What we want to see is that family unit as a functioning whole.”
Feel free to disagree, but seeing how the Endgame’s runtime is already past the three-hour mark, it’s pretty understandable that Markus and his co-writer Stephen McFeely didn’t want to spend too long covering Tony’s personal life.
As it is, the exclusion of Iron Man’s wedding allows the film to jump straight from the team’s opening mission to half a decade in the future, by which point, both the world and our heroes have changed drastically. In the same interview, Markus explained that the five-year shift meant that the story could skip right to the long-term effects of Thanos’ snap.
“I want to see the world depleted by the loss [of the snap]. The time jump allowed us to get to the meat of the matter pretty quickly. We couldn’t go any further, because then you get into a whole CG makeup situation where you’ve got to age people. Five years you can do just looking haggard.”
Of course, while Thanos’ snap has now been reversed, we can expect the five-year time-jump to have some major consequences going forward. We already got a taste of these ripple effects in Spider-Man: Far From Home, which saw the world trying to move on from the events of Avengers: Endgame, but we’ll find out how else the MCU has changed over the last half-decade when Marvel’s Phase 4 gets going next year.
