Avengers: Endgame Time Travel Suits Were Not Real

Marvel fans are still in awe of some of the visual effects on display in Avengers: Endgame, and it looks like some might not have been as obvious as they seemed. On Endgame‘s recently-released commentary track, the film’s directors and co-writers spoke about the “Quantum Realm” suits that are used throughout the film, and confirmed that they were, in fact, totally CGI.

“Props to the FX team because those boots don’t exist,” co-writer Christopher Markus revealed, during the scene where Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) travels back in time to his family farm before the Snap.

“Yeah, the entire suit is CG,” co-director Joe Russo explained.

“That is amazing,” Markus added.

“But it was important to have sort of unifying outfits.” co-writer Stephen McFeely commented. “It’s a new wrinkle for the Avengers, the idea that they’re gonna have a team lineup, you know, that has a practical reason.”

Given the ways that the Quantum Realm suits are used in the film – and the fact that the Avengers can essentially enable or disable them on a whim – it certainly makes sense that these costumes would be computer-generated. Still, it’s hard to deny that it’s a pretty impressive creative decision, one that some of the film’s VFX wizards dove into with ComicBook.com earlier this year.

“I don’t fully know the decision behind it,” Visual Effects Supervisor Russell Earl told ComicBook.com earlier this year. “I do know that what ends up happening is the suits evolve and change. In this case, I don’t think the design of the suit was fully there when they started shooting the scene and I think they were shooting multiple scenes at multiple locations. I read some articles about people saying that the suits are digital. We do it all the time and we don’t necessarily call it out. Where you know, Cap’s body will be CG, or Black Panther’s body 99 percent of the time is all CG, Spidey, when Tom’s just there wearing the suit, that’s almost always CG. So I think the decision came once the suits had to grow go on and off. So you can either choose to have two suits that they would get in and out of. I think it just came down to wanting to have the flexibility to get the design just right and at the time of shooting wasn’t quite there.”

“I’m speculating on it,” Earl added. “I don’t really know the full story behind it, but it’s something that I think all of the effects houses have gotten so good at is just doing digital costumes that the studio can rely more on it and not necessarily have to make those decisions up front. It just allows a little bit more flexibility and knowing that you’re going to have to build the suit anyway because it has the sort of nanotech growing out of the time watches that and that’s the thing. If you know you’re going to have to build the suit anyway to get the transitions, then you know you’re going to have to have a photo-real suit in which case that then also lends itself to, oh well if we’re going to have it then we can put it in these other shots. Then sometimes a lot of the costumes are built. Ant-Man’s obviously a suit that’s built but we’ve done that in all CG, or like I said, Cap, I think all of them at one point or the other have gone all CG.”

Upcoming Marvel Studios projects include Black Widow on May 1, 2020, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in Fall of 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.