An early draft of Avengers: Endgame had Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) survive Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) Infinity Stone-powered snap that wiped out fifty percent of all life in the universe in Avengers: Infinity War, co-writer Christopher Markus says. This unused version would have seen Wanda, some time after the last stand against Thanos in Wakanda that resulted in the death of Vision (Paul Bettany), look upon Vision’s greyed husk after the removal of the Mind Stone that powered his humanoid android body. Markus admits he and co-writer Stephen McFeely had little for Wanda to do in this alternate version of Endgame, ultimately deciding the character was better served disappearing in the snap.
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“We had a moment where [Scarlet Witch] looked at his body in a drawer, and it was mainly just maudlin. It was also frankly from a draft where she hadn’t been blipped,” Markus told CinemaBlend. “Because we had a draft where she survived and was a character in Endgame. The problem was she’d gotten so much mileage and story in the first movie that she didn’t really have anything that equaled that in the second. So it was a step down.”
This alternate version once had Wanda embarking on a road trip with Rocket Raccoon (voice of Bradley Cooper) to retrieve one of the six Infinity Stones needed to reverse Thanos’ snap.
“There weren’t terribly outrageous [plot lines], there were a lot more boring ones,” Markus said during San Diego Comic-Con in July. “You can go to the Triskellion; it’s a building. There was an iteration where Wanda was alive, she hadn’t been blipped. Wanda and Rocket drove a car from the Triskellion to Doctor Strange’s house, then used the doorway to go to Kamar Taj and get [the Stone]. It was like, ‘Really? We’re putting in a cross, inter-state car journey in this fast-paced action movie?’ And then wiser heads prevailed.”
The Avengers writers earlier revealed they picked the Endgame survivors by building the post-snap characters around Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans).
“We knew we wanted to see Cap and Tony dealing with the aftermath so that you could really see them suffer, quite frankly,” Markus told The New York Times. “And that’s why Cap and Natasha are relatively minimal in the first movie, because all they’d be doing is punching. We knew that they had a lot of story in the second movie, and there were other people who would have much more story in the first movie, like the Guardians.”
Olsen next returns as Wanda in Marvel Studios’ WandaVision series, streaming exclusively on Disney+ in Spring 2021. Olsen will then co-star alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, releasing to theaters May 7, 2021.
