New BTS Avengers: Endgame Stills Show Iron Man’s Heartbreaking Moment Before and After Visual Effects

Even though Avengers: Endgame had one jaw-dropping moment after another, none stood out more than the heartbreaking moment Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gave his life to save all of humanity from Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his army of millions. Now, a pair of images have popped up online that show the fan-favorite character during his touching deathbed moment with Peter Parker (Tom Holland), War Machine (Don Cheadle), and his wife Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

The pictures, which you can see after the jump below, show Downey before and after visual effects, and you might be surprised to see just how much CGI was used in the scene.

As you can see judging by the pictures, little of the scene is practical. The bloodied eye remains the same from before to after, but that’s about it. Iron Man’s suit, his burn injuries, and Holland’s Iron Spider suit are all full CGI. Earlier this Spring, we spoke with Weta Digital’s Matt Aitken, the visual effects supervisor leading the team responsible for Stark’s final moments.

“Oh, absolutely. That was huge,” Aitken said of the pressures involved in helping craft Stark’s death bed scene. “Again, there was a balancing act to achieve there. We had to make sure that his wounds looked severe enough to be fatal, there couldn’t be any doubts about that, that’s the whole point of his sacrifice. But we had to allow him to keep his dignity through that sequence, that was something that the filmmakers made very clear to us, that they didn’t want it to be so over the top gory that it lost its seriousness and it could have turned almost into a farce if you’d gone too far with it.”

“We did several different versions of that. We approached it initially through concept art, and we worked up lots of different levels of damage through concept art and reviewed that with the filmmakers at Marvel,” the VFX guru continued. “Then we worked that up in CG as a digital prosthetic and that was great because that gave us the opportunity to review the level of damage in the cast and make changes accordingly.”

What was your favorite moment from Avengers: Endgame? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or by tweeting me at @AdamBarnhardt to chat all things MCU!

Avengers: Endgame has returned to theaters for its second theatrical release ahead of Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 2nd. Captain Marvel is now available wherever movies are sold.