The End For Two ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Characters Was Decided Long Before ‘Captain America: Civil War’

Thanks to the release of a new book of concept art, the Infinity Saga box set, and countless interviews with the filmmakers, it seems every square inch of what is — and isn’t — in Avengers: Endgame is going to be discussed at one point or another. Such is the age of #content we’re currently living in, especially now that something as simple as an offhand comment from a director like Martin Scorsese can set off a media and Internet firestorm. Even so, some of the bits of background info are as informative as they are entertaining.

Like screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s recent Q&A with the Writers Guild of America West, at which Vanity Fair caught up with the pair to poke their brains a little further about their creative process on Endgame. Among the many bits of new information they dropped (and old blurbs they repeated), the writers revealed precisely how long they — along with directors Joe and Anthony Russo and producer Kevin Feige — had been planning on killing Tony Stark and sending Steve Rogers back into the past.

Hint: Iron Man and Captain America’s final curtain calls were a sure thing since before Captain America: Civil War was finished and in theaters. “Tony’s death and Cap’s dance were on three-by-five cards in September of 2015,” McFeely told Vanity Fair. Interestingly, Markus added — though with the benefit of hindsight — that sending Rogers back in time to meet back up with Peggy Carter and live a life with her was something they’d been thinking about since Captain America: The First Avenger, which was their first Marvel Studios film.

“At the very end of [2011’s] The First Avenger, when Steve misses the dance with Peggy, you start going, I wonder if there’s going to be a way to get those two together… even though 70 years has passed,” he said. McFeely made sure to point out that, of course, they “[had] not been writing the movie for 10 years… We only wrote for four years… When Civil War came out, we’d already finished the first draft of both Infinity War and Endgame. We got the job as we were prepping Civil War.”

Hilariously, Endgame co-director Joe Russo actually (kind of) referred to this fact in his response to a fake tweet claiming he had wanted to kill of Stark ever since his “billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” line in The Avengers. “I actually wanted Tony dead in Civil War,” he quipped.

— Russo Brothers (@Russo_Brothers) July 29, 2019