Avengers: Endgame Writers Reveal “Terrible” Alternate Heroes Return Scene

Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely admit an early version of the sequence showing Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and other blipped superheroes returning to life was “terrible.”

“We had one where they all come back to the exact same [place], to the compound, like [snap], boom, there they are,” McFeely said at San Diego Comic-Con. “You hear, ‘Mr. Stark?’ And there’s Peter coming around the corner. Then we cut five minutes, and they’re all eating pizza. It was terrible.”

“It was an Avengers pizza party. You gotta try things out,” added Markus.

“Because there is no hard, fast, real world factuality about [the snap], we have to make up hard, fast rules in order for this thing to make sense. One of which is that everybody came back to the point where they disappeared. So then they had to get back to our battlefield, which gave us a window of time where things still had to happen.”

After Smart Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) successfully reverses Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) erasure of half of all life in the universe — tipped off when Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) receives a call from his freshly resurrected wife — Avengers Headquarters is assaulted by Thanos and his army, forcing Earth’s mightiest heroes into a battle that acts as an audience diversion while Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) assembles an army from across the universe.

“It also meant that, even though they had effectively solved the problem they set out to solve, it didn’t feel like we ended the movie and then started it up again to fight Thanos,” Markus added.

“It still felt like we were working toward overcoming the final goal, so we couldn’t bring them in until we had Thanos in and it was part of this climactic [battle].”

“It’s why ‘On your left’ works so well,” Markus said of a callback to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a line of dialogue shared between Cap (Chris Evans) and a formerly dead Falcon (Anthony Mackie).

“Because it’s an emotional line and you go, ‘Oh, now they did it,’ even though they did it 15 minutes earlier.”

Avengers: Endgame is available to own on Digital HD July 30 and on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray August 13.