Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo never planned on bringing back Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who are jailed and dead, respectively.
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Asked by the Happy Sad Confused podcast if those two little-seen characters were ever in the mix, the Russo brothers offered a joint “no.”
“And it was also just, our struggle on this movie was just to deal with — there was so much on the table,” Anthony said. “We were always petrified of not doing service to the stuff that was more central to the narrative. That was really what we had to focus on at the end of the day.”
Sunday Express in May 2018 claimed Taylor-Johnson was spotted on set during Endgame filming.
Hammer, one of the primary threats to Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in 2010’s Iron Man 2, was last seen in 2014 One-Shot Hail the King as an inmate housed within Seagate Penitentiary.
Quicksilver, brother of Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), first appeared in the credits scene trailing Captain America: The Winter Soldier ahead of his final appearance in in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, where he was gunned down and killed despite his super speed.
When Earth’s mightiest heroes journeyed through time using the Quantum Realm and Pym Particles supplied by Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), the Avengers were met with copious past versions of such familiar faces as Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo), and Frigga (Rene Russo) — all dead by present day.
The decision to revisit select past Marvel Studios movies — 2012’s The Avengers, 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, and 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy — during the “time heist” portion of the blockbuster was informed by the location of the six Infinity Stones, required by the Avengers to reverse the snap committed by Thanos (Josh Brolin) that obliterated fifty percent of all life in the universe.
“We knew we wanted each journey that the heroes took to not just be a stone journey, but also to provide some emotional resolution,” co-writer Christopher Markus told the Los Angeles Times.
But returning to the past and bringing back familiar characters once more often proved challenging.
“Probably just re-creating the sequences in a way that was accurate. [Chris] Pratt dancing [on Vormir], that’s some footage from seven years ago [in Guardians of the Galaxy] and some footage from him now and we had to intercut it,” Joe explained to the Times.
“People change, their looks change, so we really had to re-create everyone’s look. When Downey is watching the Avengers in that final moment with Loki where he says, ‘I’ll have that drink now,’ that’s all of our current actors being made up to look like they did in the first Avengers. It was fun for us to create a different perspective for the audience. [While] Guardians opens up with this really joyful sequence where Quill is dancing his way through an alien planet, the truth of it may have been that that was all in his mind and he’s really just another guy singing out of tune to his Walkman.”
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