Avengers: Endgame’s Time Travel Suits Almost Looked Completely Different

What seems like an eternity ago, the only things fans had to cling to ahead of Avengers: Endgame were leaks. The biggest leak that happened before the movie were products that had the core team in these funky looking white outfits to explore the Quantum Realm. For a while, people wondered if the images were doctored or outright fake. But, now with the Avengers: Endgame artbook out in the world, fans can see that these suits were always going to be a part of the plan. Not only is that a fact, but the pages of that book reveal that those suits went through a bunch of different iterations before settling in on the sleek costumes that set the Internet on fire after the trailers were released. To start with the basics the suits weren’t always going to be white with red accents. Some of the images below show off a seeming navy blue color scheme. If that weren’t out there enough, the images also contain some sort of forcefield deployed around the entire facial area rather than the helmet-based design of the movie’s suits. It’s a whole lot to take in and as the images show, there was a lot of spirited debate about how to realize these suits.

One of the cooler inclusions was the Avengers logo in some of the designs. One of the designers describes the effect of switching around the logo to make the logo effectively point in reverse. A nifty little detail to signal time travel and the suit’s actual purpose in the narrative. However, that design left a ton of negative space on each character’s costume and Marvel decided to go in a different direction. A bunch of different colors were rolled out and things were constantly poked and prodded till it all shook out in a way that people in charge were satisfied with. Earlier this year, Comicbook.com was able to sit down with the Visual Effects team on Endgame. They talked about how they handled the fluid nature of this decision-making.

“I don’t fully know the decision behind it,” Visual Effects Supervisor Russell Earl said in a conversation with 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 included. “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.”