The Original ‘Captain Marvel’ Ending Has Been Revealed

(Warning: Spoilers for Captain Marvel and the MCU will be found below.)

As of Friday, Captain Marvel‘s zooming into its second weekend at the box office, and with it, the blockbuster brings the most important action sequence in the MCU, along with a phenomenal score. These are only a few of the reasons why Carol Danvers’ origin story ranks pretty darn high on our ranking of Marvel Studios movies as Phase Three prepares for completion. However, the film almost arrived with a much different ending, which likely would have muted the momentum that shall push forward into Avengers: Endgame.

As a brief refresher, Carol Danvers’ debut standalone film ended with Nick Fury experiencing a rather astonishing moment. Carol then resolves to help the Skrulls find a new home (because in the MCU, they’re more of a peace-loving species in the comics, and they only want to be left alone). Captain Marvel hands over a pager to Fury, which he’s allowed to use in “a real emergency,” and she says goodbye to Maria and Monica before flying away with Talos.

This was an ending that explained what Captain Marvel has been doing for all this time, and why she’d been absent from the MCU for a few decades before surfacing in Avengers: Endgame. Now the movie’s editor, Debbie Berman, has revealed the ending that almost went down:

It used to end with Carol flying off into space alone, and I found that a bit jarring. Like, where exactly was she going And what was she doing It felt like we needed a stronger visual to assert a more specific justification for her leaving and disappearing for so many years. So we added Talos and his family in their spaceship waiting for her, and they all fly off together. It gave her more of a sense of purpose and made it easier to believe that she left her newfound life on Earth because she was with a friend we knew she cared about, and for a more specific mission. It gave more resonance and closure to her final moment in the film.

Berman adds that she recommended that changes be made to this ending, and whew. Presumably, the original ending still would have included the pager moment, though. Otherwise, why else would we have seen Fury send the distress call right before being dusted during the Infinity War credits Yet the sense-of-purpose element is real, and we’ll soon see how Carol’s decades-long mission may have affected her, rather than wondering about where the hell she’s been instead of fighting the Chitauri in the first Avengers movie.

Instead, we can keep mulling over the Tesseract business and contemplate why, as some have noted, Carol’s wearing more makeup than usual (gasp!) while talking to Thor in the Endgame trailer. That’s only a joke, I think. Seriously though, now we can concentrate more fully on the Tesseract business and whether the Avengers can get that Space Stone back from Thanos … or travel back in time and reverse the snap. So many possibilities!

Avengers: Endgame arrives in theaters on April 26.