In the first third of Avengers: Endgame, the film offers a brief moment of levity in the gloomy post-snap world, when Natasha Romanoff threatens to throw her sandwich at Steve Rogers. And while you probably didn’t pay much mind to this cute little exchange, /Film has done a deep dive on the moment, and proposed that it could be referencing one of the earliest conversations that Marvel and Sony had over bringing Spider-Man into the MCU.
To jog your memory, the Black Widow scene comes in one of the heroine’s lowest moments, when she’s sitting wearily in the Avengers Compound, letting her roots grow out while eating a peanut butter sandwich and wallowing in her misery. Nat’s lonely abode is visited by Captain America, who points out some of the perks of living in a world where half the population has died, like cleaner water and whales in the Hudson. In response, Nat tells Steve that if he keeps trying to make her see the bright side of the snap, she’s going to hit him in the head with her sandwich.
The new /Film article connects this moment to an exchange between Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige and Sony exec Amy Pascal, as chronicled in Ben Fritz’s 2018 book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies. For context, the meeting took place about a year after the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The 2014 film’s underwhelming run at the box office essentially killed Sony’s plans for a wider cinematic universe, and so Feige approached Pascal with a new idea:
“At a lunch on a patio outside [Amy Pascal’s] office, in the summer after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, [Kevin Feige] pitched his fellow creative executive on the benefits of having Marvel Studios produce the next film, so that Peter Parker could join the same cinematic universe as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. ‘I love Spider-Man and I want to help,’ he told her.”
Of course, we now know that Pascal would ultimately take Feige up on his offer, but at the time, she didn’t take the suggestion too well:
“Pascal was so offended, she threw her sandwich at Feige and told him, playfully but truthfully, to ‘get the fuck out of here.’ Turning the character over would be an insult, she felt, not jut to her but to the entire studio.”
Could Avengers: Endgame have taken inspiration from this sandwich-throwing incident? Or are the parallels just a coincidence? We’ll leave it to you to decide.
