Warning: There are major spoilers ahead for Avengers Endgame!
As Avengers: Endgame heads into its second weekend, it’s ready to make even more box office records. One big factor to its success is its phenomenal final battle. As it unfolds, Thanos’ forces go head-to-head against the Avengers over control of the Infinity Gauntlet. But putting the sequence together wasn’t always easy. Endgame’s screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely recently spoke with Fandango about putting that epic scene together. And there was a lot more work than expected.
“Approach it by writing it about ten thousand times,” Markus said when asked about how it initially came together.
“Try to create a central spine, right?” added McFeely. “And certainly that thing was longer and had more reunions and all that kind of stuff, and it just got bloated…But in essence, we said to ourselves, alright, they all come back. They have an early wave of success. Thanos then fights back. You dollop in a few reunions that you need, Tony and Peter being kind of the most important, and then very quickly I got them back in the field and try to create tis spine of will they or won’t they.”
Related: Sebastian Stan Thought Avengers: Endgame Would Have a Different Ending
“So we called it the ‘flea-flicker’,” continued McFeely. “Mostly because most of us don’t know much about sports. But the idea that the gauntlet would get passed from hero to hero in a desperate attempt to get it through a throng of villains to the goal line. And then even then the goal line is destroyed and now you’re in this scramble for who’s going to get the Stones.”
Markus then discussed an unlikely element that entered the fray.
“We realized that the ridiculous van from Ant-Man…could come back and be of use in the third act,” said Markus. “What we didn’t want to do was bend over backwards to have Thanos have destroyed the whole compound except the one machine, and the van seemed like a nice save.”
You can see this epic battle for yourself in Avengers: Endgame, which is now in theaters.
What do you think about the film’s final showdown? Let us know in the comments below.
