Earlier this month, Avengers: Endgame co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed that early plans for the movie saw the 2014 version of Thanos kill all the Avengers in his timeline before meeting up with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in the present day. And if that idea wasn’t dark enough, the pair also said that the Mad Titan was originally going to confront the main timeline’s heroes while carrying the severed head of Captain America.
By MCU standards, it certainly would’ve made for a memorably gruesome moment, and while the idea ultimately didn’t make the final script, Stephen McFeely has now offered further details on what might’ve been. Speaking to IMDb, the scribe painted a picture of how the decapitated Cap scene was supposed to played out:
“When Thanos comes back, and he comes through a hole that Nebula has created and all that, we had to decide what the playing field was for that final battle. And one of the ideas was that she opens a time rift, he walks through from 2014 Earth, where he’s already gone and laid waste to the whole place. And so our heroes come out of the dust, they see this figure walking toward them, he crosses from light to dark or whatever, and it’s Thanos, and he tosses something at their feet. And it rolls and lands at Steve’s feet, and it’s his own head.”
Markus then clarified that Steve Rogers’ head would’ve been presented “with the helmet still on,” which may explain how they were hoping to fit this moment into a PG-13 movie.
In the same interview, Avengers: Endgame co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo were asked whose decision it was to scrap the scene, prompting Joe to exclaim, “It wasn’t us!” Indeed, according to Anthony, the sequence was “a favorite” of theirs, though he admitted that it was “a complicated idea” to pull off. Joe went on to recall how Steve’s severed head was an ongoing topic of discussion:
“The four of us sat in a room for months going, ‘How do we make Captain America’s severed head work? We can’t figure out where we go once he throws his head at his feet, where does the story go?’”
For better or worse, the team eventually had to drop the idea, leaving us to wonder what exactly became of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in the other timeline. Perhaps that’s a question for a future Marvel project to answer, but in the meantime, we’ll find out how the next Captain America fares in Steve’s shoes when The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premieres next year.