Avengers: Endgame Directors Explain Tony Stark’s Deleted Scene with Katherine Langford

Disney+ launched on Tuesday with a surprise for fans of Avengers: Endgame. The deleted scenes included on the streaming service are different from those included on the blu-ray editions. One scene in particular sees 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford playing a grown up Morgan H. Stark in a vision of Tony Stark’s after he snapped his fingers to destroy Thanos and his army. In it, Morgan communicates to her dying father that his efforts allowed her to grow up and he had essentially saved the world. In a commentary track available on Disney+, Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo.

“This was the originally what happened after Tony snapped his fingers,” Joe Russo said. “We sent him to what we would call The Way Station to mirror what would happen to Thanos with his daughter in Infinity War. We’re now doing something similar with Tony and his daughter.”

“The idea is that that act sort of forces you to confront or reconcile something that’s unresolved in your soul,” Anthony Russo added. The scene is one of many big Marvel reveals packed into the Disney+ launch.

“The idea was that if we cast his daughter as an adult so that he could come to peace with what he had just done by talking to her,” Joe Russo said. “Obviously, these Stones have the most power so it would create a scenario where he could speak to his daughter in the future who tells him everything’s gonna be okay and it allows him to die. But, again, when we put this movie in the film, we felt that we ground the movie to a halt and he does something similar in the next sequence when he gives his own eulogy. So, what can happen in a film this big is it feels like you just have ending after ending after ending and it just feels like the movie’s never gonna end. Then, the endings when you have too many sequences in a row, you can dilute the value of each one of them.”

The scene itself, while never having made it to a finalized version, was not in line with the quality of pacing for the rest of the movie. “Even on a structural level, even though Tony Stark’s primary conflict what he needs to do in this movie is this idea that he’s found happiness and found a family, built a family and found happiness,” Anthony Russo said. “Then, what’s at risk is him losing that. Even though it was sort of this idea that he’ll never know his daughter beyond this moment in time and that he can actually have an experience of her here seemed emotional and cathartic. Because this adult version of Morgan, his daughter, was never in the film as we would watch it in post, we started to feel like we didn’t have an emotional connection to her, even though this is a wonderful actor. We didn’t have an emotional connection to the character because we’d never seen her before.”

Ultimately, “it just seemed like this would be better without it,” Anthony Russo concluded.

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