In a blink and you’ll miss it cameo, the pirate pleasure planet known as Contraxia made a sudden appearance in Avengers: Endgame. That’s right, as more and more marketing material surfaces promoting the home media release of the most recent Avengers flick, fans continue their dissection of the film’s famous portals scene. As pointed out by one eagle-eyed Guardians of the Galaxy fan, Contraxia can totally be seen through one of the film’s portals. As one might expect, the portal is the one many of the red leather-wearing Ravagers hop out of, offering their weaponry to help stop Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his mighty armies.
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Contraxia wasn’t the only MCU location seen through the portals. Fans also got to see environments like Wakanda, Kamar-Taj, and New Asgard. Earlier this year, we spoke with Weta Digital’s Matt Aitken, the VFX supervisor who led the team responsible for the jaw-dropping portals scene. Then, he explained why everything within the portals had to be computer-generated rather than filmed on sound stages.
“Yeah, all those environments you see inside the portals are entirely CG. As you say there’s Wakanda and New Asgard, but there’s also Titan and Kamar-Taj and Contraxia, where the Ravagers come from,” Aitken explained. “They had to be CG because we are, essentially, filming those environments with the same camera that we’re running on the compound, the battlefield side of the portal. So that as the camera’s moving back in these big, dynamic, sweeping camera moves, we want it all to feel like the parallax is correct and everything’s locking together so that there’s a connection between what’s on this side of the portal and what’s inside the portal. The only way that we can get that camera move to be correct is to actually make it a CG environment and then film it with the same camera if you’d like, throughout.”
What was your favorite Easter egg in Avengers: Endgame? Share your thoughts in the comments below or by tweeting me at @AdamBarnhardt to chat all things MCU!
Upcoming Marvel Studios projects include Black Widow on May 1, 2020, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in fall 2020, The Eternals on November 6, 2020, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on February 12, 2021, WandaVision in spring 2021, Loki in spring 2021, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on May 7, 2021, What If? In summer 2021, Hawkeye in fall 2021, and Thor: Love and Thunder on November 5, 2021.
