Avengers: Endgame Director Reveals New Details Of Thanos’ Backstory, Cut 10 Minute Scene

Tonight in Los Angeles, ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis sat down with Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo to discuss the massive success of the film and how he went about closing out over a decade of storytelling spanning more than 20 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Along the way, they talked about Thanos — the villain of both Endgame and Russo’s previous Avengers epic, last year’s Infinity War.

The question was, did the movie originally give a little bit more insight into Thanos’s backstory? It’s a fair enough question, since Russo and his brother Anthony, who directed Infinity War and Endgame with him, have characterized Infinity War as a “Thanos movie,” centering on his quest and giving him the traditional heroic happy ending. So did we ever get to see the moments that shaped him into the good-natured mass murderer he is? Apparently it could have happened.

“Of course. We did a lot of drafts of Infinity War that involved Thanos’s backstory,” Russo told Davis. “We even had a draft where you saw ten minutes of his backstory. You saw him as a child, you saw him try to convince his planet that it was doomed and recommend that they randomly kill half the population to save the planet. He gets sent to a prison off-planet and eventually watches the planet destroy itself….It is a whole other film, but sometimes that’s the value in a story room, of writing that draft in the script because you go ‘alright, at least I have that in my brain now. And I understand that and I can pitch it to Brolin, and he can hear that intimate level fo detail so we all know what his story is and how he feels about his past. He’s a very tortured character who’s sociopathic, but ultimately it’s benevolent sociopathy.”

Avengers: Endgame is in theaters now.

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