Iron Man Almost Visited Another Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie In ‘Avengers: Endgame’

[Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, a movie that came out months ago]

One of the best scenes in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame (there’s a lot of them) is when Tony Stark and Steve Rogers travel back to the events of the original The Avengers movie, in 2012. Loki-engineered, butt-based shenanigans ensues. But in an early version of the screenplay, Iron Man was going to visit another location in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Asgard, Thor’s stomping grounds.

“Technically in Thor: The Dark World, the Tesseract is in the vault as the Aether is also there,” Endgame co-writer Stephen McFeely told Empire. “So that sent Tony to Asgard, and he had an invisible stealth suit, and he fought Heimdall, who could of course see him. I think [co-director Joe Russo] went in and said, ‘Why don’t we go in to Avengers It’s the biggest movie, it’s the most fun, let’s go.'” And go they did, leaving behind Heimdall, played by Idris Elba, who’s one of the MCU’s biggest stars to not appear in Endgame (he was killed by Thanos in Infinity War, but so was Loki, so who knows). Anyway, Russo made the right choice to send Tony to New York instead of Asgard, if for no other reason than people like The Avengers; but people do not like Thor: The Dark World.

In that same conversation with Empire, co-writer Christopher Markus also reveals that Marvel Studios didn’t insist on Tony Stark dying. “Marvel as a whole said, ‘We think it might be a time [for Tony to die], but if you have a good reason not to do it, feel free – we’ll do whatever.’ But it really did seem like, particularly with what Tony experiences after the five- year break… that there wasn’t anywhere left that he needed to go,” he said. “This was a guy who had made his full journey, all the way to the end, had experienced a full rehabilitation of his character from being the douchebag in the back of the Humvee at the beginning of the first Iron Man. To have him make the sacrifice that Steve Rogers would have made had he had the opportunity at that moment, just felt really right.”

You can listen to the Endgame interview below.