The ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Directors Have Explained Why This Superhero Was The First To Return From The ‘Blip’

As part of Marvel Studio’s “We Love You 3000 Tour,” Avengers: Endgame co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo dropped by Reddit on Wednesday for an AMA session. And boy did people ask them anything: there are more 4,700 comments on the thread, and the Russos did a commendable job of responding to as many questions as possible. Then again, they balanced something like 500 superheroes in Endgame, so this was nothing to them. One of the most upvoted answers came in response to this question: “I’ve always found the order of the characters that come out of the portal so interesting. Do you guys have a particular explanation on the sequencing Was there any discussion of having Bucky come out first, making him the first person Steve sees alive”

Joe Russo handled this one. “We spent a lot of time in the edit room playing around with the sequencing of the portals. We probably didn’t lock that section of the movie until about a month before the film was in theaters,” he wrote. “We always wanted Sam to be the first one to communicate with Cap via his comm and Sam was last in Wakanda, so logically the first portal that would open would the Wakandan portal. And the first person that would logically walk through a portal from Wakanda would be the king himself, bringing his army once again to the defense of Cap and the world.” And thus, T’Challa gets the loudest applause from the crowd in the movie (at least during my screening).

Other highlights from the AMA include:

Q: If the Disney-Fox deal had gone through earlier, how many heroes would you have wanted to incorporate into Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame

A: Double the amount.

Q: Could Cap always wield Mjolnir (meaning he could have picked it up in Age of Ultron and decided not to), or did he progressively get more worthy over time

A: He always could. Our interpretation of the famous scene in Ultron was that when he realized he could pick up Mjolnir he chose not to, because he didn’t want to embarrass Thor.

Q: What was your most difficult day of shooting for Endgame

A: Tony Stark’s death.

It certainly wasn’t filming an empty Citi Field; that place is always barren. You can read the rest of the responses here.