Avengers: Endgame Writers Once Considered Bigger Role for Soulworld Until Science Won Out

Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely once considered a more comic book [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely once considered a more comic book faithful approach to the Soulworld when working out how souls "blipped" by Thanos' (Josh Brolin) snap could return to life after Avengers: Infinity War.

"Well, everything was on the table at the beginning. We didn't actually write any of the other variations, but we certainly talked about what if Soulworld, which is a real thing in the comics, was a real thing here? What if [the Infinity Stones] were just rescattered across the universe? But a lot of it seemed too much like a repeat of movie one," Markus told Backstory Magazine.

"You collected the stones, which were scattered. Now they're scattered again and you have to collect 'em again. That's not upping it, it's just doing it again."

Instead, the decision was made to have the Avengers resort to pulling off a time heist, using Pym Particles to travel through the Quantum Realm and return to select points of time in the past to retrieve the six Infinity Stones destroyed by Thanos in 2018.

That plot point came "mostly from how much we wanted to explore character," added McFeely.

"We wanted to roll around in the misery, to put the onus on the six O.G. Avengers and really let them deal with the loss. We think of that five-year time jump as a chance to tell a [Marvel Comics] What If? story, to move all your characters five years and find them in different places. So any version that didn't really seal the deal and put the snap in concrete didn't get that. You had to own the consequences and start all over again."

Markus and McFeely consulted a quantum physicist who told the writers the depiction of time travel in Back to the Future was "bullsh-t," and they quickly zeroed in on science displayed in Marvel's own Ant-Man franchise as the solution to the Avengers' once unsolvable problem.

"That slowly led to us to the time-travel do-over, and we know there can be an eye roll for that so we tried to ground it in some real science — and certainly science the MCU had already rolled out for us," McFeely said.

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