"I was too aggressive". Kevin Feige wanted to traumatize Marvel fans with the end of ‘Avengers: Endgame’ but the Russos made him change his mind

The Russo Brothers They don’t stop grabbing headlines lately, both because of the premiere of ‘The Invisible Agent’, which has failed to live up to Netflix’s expectations, and because of statements like Jon Favreau trying not to kill Iron Man at the end of ‘Avengers: Endgame’. The curious thing is that the outcome would have been much more traumatic had an idea that he presented Kevin Feig.

Apparently Feige wanted to kill all the original avengers in the movie. Come on, that Captain America, Thor, Hawkeye and Hulk also lost their lives then and that the only casualties were not those of Iron Man and Widow. The Russos have revealed this fact in the podcast Happy Sad Confusedwhere Joe Russo commented the following:

In fact, Kevin proposed at one point to eliminate everyone. We thought it was too aggressive and that the audience wouldn’t be able to process it, and that actually casting one or two characters to make sacrifices throughout the movie might give us moments throughout the movie where the action could stop and we could have an emotional catharsis and then continue with the narration and have more emotional catharsis.

The origin of the idea

Of course, it seems that Feige did not trust that idea so much either, because Anthony Russo clarifies that all that was “very early in development, not that there was never a script or anything that included it“. What Joe Russo did specify is where Feige got that idea from:

Early on, Kevin pitched us the idea of ​​it being like ‘Toy Story 3,’ where everyone had to jump into the fire to save the universe, and we thought you had to go beyond storytelling on something on this scale, so we weren’t sure how it could come to that.

Personally, I think that Feige’s idea would make all the sense in the world if ‘Avengers: Endgame’ had been intended to end the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is true that it is the culmination of a historical stage, but that is not the same as a definitive closure. Also, killing so many main characters at once it would have been too much.