Even three months after it first hit theaters, the climactic portals scene at the end of Avengers: Endgame is still a pretty astonishing sequence to take in — even for the hundredth time. In preparation for the home media release of Marvel’s latest major team-up blockbuster on August 13th, we spoke with Avengers: Endgame visual effects supervisor Dan DeLeeuw about some of the film’s most pivotal moments. Yes, that most certainly includes a comprehensive breakdown about how the portals scene came to be.
As the two-time Oscar nominee tells us, the portals scene wasn’t in the plans since the get-go. Rather, it was something workshopped by the entire creative team as they worked to get Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the team from Titan to Avengers HQ in upstate New York.
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“We knew we left people on Titan and we knew we left them with Dr. Strange and so we kind of knew we were going to use portals to bring people in because we knew Dr. Strange had to get to the Guardians and Spidey back from Titan,” DeLeeuw explains. “So that kind of naturally led into the idea that after Hulk snapped and from the time that, you know, the three on one at the beginning and Cap against, Thanos versus Cap, Dr. Strange went around and came up with the idea of opening all the portals up and bringing everybody back.”
When DeLeeuw and the vendors were working on the sequence in pre-vis, the VFX guru admittedly ran into a roadblock when trying to figure out the best way to get all of the Avengers — and plenty of welcome guests — all back on the same screen. At the end of the day, DeLeeuw says he wanted to try and give fans the most satisfying result as possible.
“…for all intents and purposes, the heroes were gone and dead and so you bring them back in that way gave them all a showcase for everybody to kind of…where we truly left some people devastated at the end of Infinity War, we kind of brought everybody back and gave that emotional catharsis for the characters on-screen and for everybody watching it off-screen,” says DeLeeuw. “It was kind of driven by the emotion of that.”
What was your favorite moment in Avengers: Endgame? Share your thoughts in the comments below or by tweeting me at @AdamBarnhardt to chat all things MCU! Avengers: Endgame is now out digitally ahead of a home media release on August 13th.
Other 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.
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