Avengers: Endgame Directors Explain Why They Didn’t Show More of the Vanished Returning to Life

Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo didn’t explore the return of half the world’s formerly vanished population because it was more “emotionally arresting” to instead keep the focus on characters audiences are already familiar with.

“Well, when we see those things in movies, I just feel like I disconnect from them, because I don’t know those people,” Joe Russo told Slate when asked why there was no big reunion scene after The Vanished were willed back into existence by the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

“And so we always try to find a way to tell that story through the characters that we have and that we care about.”

A small scale reunion was shown between Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and his family, who were among the billions of lives snapped out of existence five years earlier. Another came when a freshly resurrected Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was seen returning to school and reuniting with best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon).

“We feel like that’s more emotionally arresting, is the characters that the audience has been following through this narrative, realizing the catharsis of that moment with those characters,” Anthony said.

Added Joe, “And as directors, we’d rather direct a scene between Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner than with Extra 4 and Extra 5.”

“The other thing we like to think about, too — but it was more on a joking level, we never really approached it as a real dramatic issue — was just simply the remarriages that may have happened during those five years,” Anthony quipped.

Instead, that look into a post-snap world comes in July’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, which picks up almost immediately after the events of Endgame.

“That’s one of the fun things that we get to play with — the sort of real-world, ground-level implications of something like that,” director Jon Watts told Fandango, pointing to Spider-Man’s status as a friendly neighborhood superhero “on the ground level of this fantastic universe.”

“So many things happened in Endgame, but you don’t see any of the fallout. So I used Peter Parker/Spider-Man as an opportunity to get that ground-level perspective to show you what it would look like if all these crazy things had happened,” Watts said. “What would day-to-day life be? If you were snapped away, you’d have to work backwards and retake your midterms.”

That means digging into the “most mundane implications” of a world dealing with the sudden return of half its population.

“Like, your birthday on your driver’s license or passport would say that you are five years older than you technically are,” Watts said. “Those sorts of questions are just so fascinating to me, and I really wanted to get into the minutiae of it and really explore that.”

Spider-Man: Far From Home opens July 2.

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