Avengers: Endgame Directors Reveal Why Black Panther Was the First Hero to Return

Now that Marvel Studios is hard at work on the future of their films, directors Joe and Anthony Russo are taking the time to reflect on Avengers: Endgame and how the biggest film of all time actually came together. One of the movie's most epic moments occurs at the end, when the portal opens behind Captain America and the newly revived Black Panther arrives along with his army.

The Russo Brothers revealed the reasoning behind this choice in a Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, explaining that there was a deliberate reason why T'Challa was the first person we see walking out of the portal.

"We spent a lot of time in the edit room playing around with the sequencing of the portals," Joe Russo wrote. W"e probably didn't lock that section of the movie until about a month before the film was in theaters. We always wanted Sam to be the first one to communicate with Cap via his comm and Sam was last in Wakanda, so logically the first portal that would open would the Wakandan portal. And the first person that would logically walk through a portal from Wakanda would be the king himself, bringing his army once again to the defense of Cap and the world."

That sequence was the first major reveal of Thanos' snap being reversed; even though Ant-Man's wonder at the chirping birds was a clear indicator, the Avengers didn't have time to rejoice in their victory because the Mad Titan had initiated a brand new attack.

The filmmakers put a lot of thought into how the snapped heroes would return and enter the battle, explaining how they refined their ideas while speaking on the commentary track for Avengers: Endgame.

"Just on an act-construction level, we were faced with a strange problem where we needed two snaps of the Gauntlet and asked ourselves often 'what does it mean to bring everybody back?' And 'What is the best way to do that?' We certainly tried a version where everyone came back and you knew it immediately, and there they were," said co-writer Stephen McFeely. "Maybe they all came back to wherever you wished them to come back. And then Thanos attacked them all at once. Doing that prevented us from a really heroic reveal, which is coming in about 20 minutes where the cavalry comes."

Avengers: Endgame is now available on Digital HD, and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on August 13th.