Throughout Avengers: Infinity War and the subsequent Avengers: Endgame, we saw a revolving door of heroes and villains getting killed off only to return later. And according to co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, in an early version of the Endgame story, even the original six Phase 1 Avengers weren’t spared from the carnage.
As you likely recall, the Russo Brothers’ latest feature saw the demise of Thanos in the film’s opening minutes, only for an alternate version of the Mad Titan to travel to the main timeline from 2014. At this weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con, however, Markus revealed that the villain almost made a quick detour to dispose of his own reality’s version of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes:
“In one, he — being Thanos — knowing it would take Nebula some time to rejigger the time machine… so he went to his present-day Earth and wiped it out and killed the Avengers and then Nebula would turn on the time machine, he would walk through the time machine with [the body of an Avenger he had killed] and say, ‘I killed you again. What are you going to do?’”
At the same panel, Markus and McFeely reportedly clarified that Thanos would’ve arrived in the present day carrying the severed head of Captain America. Compared to the bloodless genocide that ended Infinity War, this sounds like a pretty brutal scene that might not have gone down well with the parents in the audience, but it certainly would’ve been a moment to get the fans talking.
Incidentally, assuming the alternate timeline Avengers survived the events of Endgame, you have to wonder how things turned out for the world that 2014 Thanos left behind. Did the Guardians of the Galaxy never form? What sort of adventures did Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have without the Mad Titan around to keep them busy? Perhaps these are questions that some future Marvel project will address, but in the meantime, the answers are yours to imagine.