Avengers: Endgame is a movie filled with easter eggs, callbacks, epic action scenes, and devastatingly emotional character moments … but it almost featured a truly out-of-this-world fight scene midway through the second act.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ‘AVENGERS: ENDGAME’ WILL FOLLOW AFTER THE GIFs (LITERALLY, RIGHT AFTER THE GIFs).
As fans who have seen Avengers: Endgame know, the second act of the film features Earths Mightiest Heroes returning to moments in the MCU’s past, including the climactic Battle of New York from 2012’s The Avengers.
And because of all that time-travel shenanigans, Captain America eventually finds himself face-to-face with … Captain America.
However, according to the geniuses behind Avengers: Endgame, it was originally Thor who was going to end up in a battle against himself.
In an interview with Happy Sad Confused, Anthony and Joe Russo — the directors of the film — reveal they had originally written a Thor vs Thor fight scene but ultimately scrapped it because it was “overly complicated”.
“We did have a sequence where they finally confront each other in Asgard. I can’t remember exactly why we moved off it. I think it got overly complicated, and we liked Cap versus Cap better,” the Russo brothers explained.
“I think there we also deferred to the storyline of Thor and his mother, which was more resonate. That was more part of Thor’s journey and repair than confronting his former self,” they continued.
It was likely a wise decision to skip the Thor-on-Thor fight scene, as the Asgardians arc across Infinity War and Endgame was by far the most emotionally compelling.
Avengers: Endgame — released in theaters on the evening of Thursday, April 25 — was the 22nd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which first began with 2008’s Iron Man.
In the weeks since its release, Avengers: Endgame has shattered all sorts of box office records and is already the second-highest grossing film of all time. At this point, Endgame becoming the highest-grossing movie ever made is a question of “when”, not “if.”