Deadpool Creator Theorizes Avengers: Endgame Posed Huge Problem for Game of Thrones’ Final Season

Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld believes the “near perfect” landing stuck by Avengers: Endgame as a finale to the first 11-year chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe posed a “huge problem” for HBO’s Game of Thrones, which closed out its eighth and final season Sunday.

“I have a theory that I’ve espoused for the past 7 weeks, and it’s that #Avengers:Endgame near perfect sticking of their landing in regards to their finale presented a huge problem for #GOT final season,” Liefeld tweeted.

“I won’t get into it now, but I believe it now more than ever.”

Liefeld has yet to expand on his theory, but later tweeted he “loved the finale.”

The comic book creator paid tribute to the series with Game of Thrones drawings published on Instagram, where Liefeld extended a letter of thanks to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and “an extraordinary cast of mega talented actors.”

“Oh man, I’m as overwhelmed as the rest of you. I could never imagine a series as complicated and lush and brilliant would ever be on television,” Liefeld wrote in part. “We cheered and clapped at the close. I LOVED Game Of Thrones. I loved all of it.”

As an addendum, Liefeld added he would be “deleting all the whiners.”

Game of Thrones‘ final season experienced push back from dissatisfied viewers; some went so far as to launch a petition urging HBO to remake Season 8, an effort that has since exceeded one million signatures.

The petition came as Season 8 reached a ratings high: its penultimate episode, “The Bells,” was at the time of release HBO’s most-watched single episode of any series at 18.4 million viewers. But the episode was also the most poorly received in series history, earning just a 48% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.

Where Benioff and Weiss were tasked with concluding the fan-favorite fantasy drama with a six-episode season after eight years, Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo were cognizant of their responsibility to bring a satisfying finale to the 22-movie saga launched with 2008’s Iron Man.

“We not only had to resolve our own movies but all the other MCU movies from the last 10 years,” Anthony Russo told IndieWire.

The ending — which included permanent sendoffs for A-listers Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans), among others — was the first thing the Russos cracked with screenwriting duo Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

“When we were working on both Infinity War and Endgame, the first thing we did was break the ending of Endgame. Because we wanted to know where we were going,” Joe Russo told Collider.

“It’s very hard to tell a story if you don’t know where you’re going. So we have a very specific process with [Markus and McFeely] where we spent months in a room just talking about a three-page outline. Literally, page one is act one, page two is act two, page three is act three. Because you have to know in a contained document like that, ‘Here’s where we start, here’s what happens in the middle, here’s where it ends.’ If you know that, it’s a lot easier to get to script. A more malleable format to work in a short outline like that, spend your time talking about it and thinking it through.”

Russo added, “We knew fairly early on how this was gonna end.”