The Russo Brothers are taking a break from the Marvel Cinematic Universe after directing
Avengers: Infinity War and
Avengers: Endgame back to back, but that doesn't mean they're finished with Marvel Studios.
Something that's become clear in recent months, however, is the fact that it's going to take something special to bring them back, and it sounds like it could end up involving the characters who have returned home as part of the Disney/Fox merger.
"We love Marvel, we have the most amazing working relationship with them, and we're very close with them," Anthony revealed.
"Maybe there will be an idea that comes up in the future, but there is none now."
Joe Russo added, "It's just about finding the right story that inspires us. That's why we get out of bed every day." Pushed for details on what might ultimately tempt them back, he added: "I love Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom was always one of my favorite villains."
Adding that he's also a fan of Wolverine, he noted that the hero has "got to be set aside for a little while," which makes sense, as we probably won't see any of the X-Men or Fantastic Four characters in the MCU until Phase 5 so moviegoers are given the chance to forget about the current iterations before moving on to the next one.
Honestly, common sense says that Marvel Studios just needs to greenlight Secret Wars already...
Hit the "View List" button for a revealing new interview with the Avengers: Endgame directors!
It's Down To James Gunn To Introduce Nova
Heading into both
Avengers: Infinity War and
Avengers: Endgame, fans were hopeful that Nova might make an appearance, especially as the Power Stone was being looked after by the Nova Corps on Xandar.
"We never considered introducing him," Joe confirms.
"I think that exists more in the Guardians universe. That would have to be a James Gunn thing."
The filmmaker went on to point out that the final battle includes dozens of characters with history in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and notes the challenges that would have come with bringing in an unknown.
"[We] just had too many characters on our plate. And you can't introduce somebody who doesn't have their own movie like [Captain] Marvel."
"You can't just throw them into the final chapter of a book," he concludes.
Is The Vision Alive Or Dead?
There was no sign of The Vision in
Avengers: Endgame despite theories that he might somehow have been brought back to life during the five years that passed since
Avengers: Infinity War.
Well, despite the fact he's set to return on Disney+ in
WandaVision alongside Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch, Joe remained coy, saying:
"Vision? He’s dead as far as I know." Do you buy that?
Could Iron Man Return?
That may seem like a silly question, but Joe was indeed asked about the possibility of Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To be fair, resurrections are commonplace in comic books so what does the future hold in store for Tony Stark?
"Tony’s dead, you know?" Russo explained.
"That’s it for Robert. He’s done." Well, that puts and end to that then.
Why Doesn't Bucky Become The New Captain America?
In the comics, it's Bucky who becomes Captain America following Steve Rogers' demise. Years later, The Falcon does inherit the mantle, and that's the direction the MCU has gone in. So, why did the Russo Brothers decide to skip over the former Winter Soldier's time as the Star Spangled superhero? According to Joe, it just made more sense for them from a story perspective to go with Sam.
"Cap and Bucky are brothers but you know what's interesting about them is they're very different people and I think that Bucky always has the ability to have his mind corrupted, it can always be taken over by someone else. That hasn't been resolved for him and Sam has his free will and I think that Sam also had a similar ethic as Cap as far as service goes in the military.
"Sam still retains that spirit of service to the community and he lives in that circle very clearly in the movies. Comic books and movies are very different and our interpretation of the characters if you've been following the movies are very different from what the books are so as it stands in these films, Bucky is still a damaged character who I think feels like he doesn't want the shield and I think that ultimately Sam is a character with free will who is the closest in morality to what Cap was and Cap believes he deserves it."
Captain America Has Always Been Able To Lift Mjolnir
"I think everyone who’s a Marvel fan in that moment where Cap tested the hammer, felt deep down in their heart that he was worthy and that he could potentially lift that and boy wouldn’t it be special if one day he did," Joe said when asked about the moment in
Avengers: Age of Ultron that Captain America first attempted to life Thor's hammer.
So why didn't he use it before now? Was he not worthy? "In our heads, he was able to wield it," Anthony confirms. "He didn’t know that until that moment in Ultron when he tried to pick it up, but Cap’s sense of character and his sort of humility and sort of out of deference to Thor’s ego, Cap in that moment realizing he can move the hammer, decides not to."
How Howard The Duck's Cameo Came To Be
It was easy to miss, but Howard the Duck arrives alongside the rest of The Ravagers during that final battle with Thanos in
Avengers: Endgame so how did that come to pass?
"Literally a month ago...it was probably just over a month ago, it was one of the last things we did," Joe says.
"We were sitting in VFX and I was watching that shot of everyone coming out of the portals and I was like 'God, it would be so awesome to have a Howard the Duck cameo here.'"
"And I just said to the VFX team "Is there any way in hell you can pull this off?'" he continues. "We were literally like three days from ending all VFX shots and they looked at me and were like 'We'll see what we can do.'"
Thor Vs. Thor
Thor obviously visits Asgard in
Avengers: Endgame but never comes face to face with his younger, buffer self. Was that ever in the works, though?
"We did have that thread," Joe confirmed.
"We did have that, actually," Anthony added.
"There was a sequence where they did finally confront each other in Asgard. I can’t remember exactly why we weaved off of that."
"I think it overly complicated, and then we liked the 'Cap vs Cap' better," his brother concluded.
Gamora's Fate
It's already been confirmed that the original Gamora is dead and gone, but what about the version from 2014 who travelled into the present?
"Quill's searching for her at the end of the movie, is she alive, is she dead, we have no idea," Joe explains.
"Even if she is alive, it's not the same Gamora."
"The way timelines work is you've gotten a different character. This is not the same person, she doesn't have the same emotional memories, she doesn't have the same relationship to him...as far as, they look like the same person but they don't have the same experiences and the same emotional memories, it's not the same person. No matter what, this would be a journey for him."
Explaining The Marvel Multiverse
The
Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer revealed the existence of the Multiverse and while there's been some speculation that Mysterio is lying to Spider-Man and Nick Fury, it sounds like
Avengers: Endgame did indeed lead to its creation.
"What's most compelling is that this is a multiverse," Joe confirms.
"But that is what's most interesting. You've seen everything else, everything else about being looped in time or whatever, you've seen it all. What's really interesting is that you create multiple timelines and it's said in the movie twice."
He also elaborated on Bruce Banner's comments and explained that while changing the past doesn't change your timeline, it does create a new, alternate future.
"What happens is you then create a new future by going into the past. So, you have to travel to the past, come back to that present and then fix it moving forward because you can’t' alter it from back there. So, by necessity, by logic, you then create -- if you were to stay back there -- you would create an alternate timeline."
Cutting Thanos' Backstory
This is more about
Infinity War than it is
Endgame, but Joe has now revealed what those deleted scenes delving into the Mad Titan's backstory would have entailed had they made it into the first film.
"We did a lot of drafts of Infinity War that involved Thanos’s backstory. We even had a draft where you saw ten minutes of his backstory. You saw him as a child, you saw him try to convince his planet that it was doomed and recommend that they randomly kill half the population to save the planet. He gets sent to a prison off-planet and eventually watches the planet destroy itself….It is a whole other film, but sometimes that’s the value in a story room, of writing that draft in the script because you go ‘alright, at least I have that in my brain now. And I understand that and I can pitch it to Brolin, and he can hear that intimate level fo detail so we all know what his story is and how he feels about his past. He’s a very tortured character who’s sociopathic, but ultimately it’s benevolent sociopathy."
A Different Take On That Morag Sequence
When War Machine and Nebula travel to Morag, they retrieve the Power Stone after knocking Star-Lord out while he dances around the planet. However, that was originally going to be quite a bit more intricate and would have included Black Widow and Hawkeye.
"I think we had one where the entire planet was under water now and that was the complication when they arrived at Morag. They had to actually get to the temple of the Power Stone by [water]," Anthony said, before Joe elaborated on what that would have entailed. "They were going there earlier than Quill had gone, and there was a tide shift on the planet and it was under water and now they had to figure out — it was a set piece I think that involved Widow, Hawkeye, Nebula, and Rhodey."
"There may have been a giant sea eel," Anthony laughed while noting that it was "a very early idea."
No Cameos For Quicksilver And Justin Hammer
Quite some time ago, rumours started swirling that Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) would be making an appearance in
Avengers: Infinity War and
Endgame.
Asked if that was ever really going to happen, the jointly replied
"no" before Anthony added,
"And it was also just, our struggle on this movie was just to deal with — there was so much on the table. We were always petrified of not doing service to the stuff that was more central to the narrative. That was really what we had to focus on at the end of the day."
Black Widow's Big Scene Was Originally Much Different
Black Widow makes the ultimate sacrifice in
Avengers: Endgame, but things very nearly panned out differently for the hero on Vormir in an earlier draft.
"There was another version of Vormir that involved Thanos’ troops showing up and then Black Widow having to run the Gauntlet and getting shot as she runs the Gauntlet to leap off the cliff," Joe revealed.
He added that the action-heavy sequence "just felt like it was distracting from what was most powerful about the scene, which was two friends, one of them having to die, and then literally fighting each other to be the one who dies. And that just seemed like a more emotional and on-story execution of it, and we ended up scrapping the more complicated version of Vormir."
About Those Namor And Captain Britain "Easter Eggs"
In
Avengers: Endgame, Okoye mentions Earthquakes under the sea off the coast of Africa but was that a nod to Namor the Submariner?
"Maaaybe," Joe smiled before Anthony teased:
"Some people may interpret it that way."
As for whether that agent with the surname "Braddock" might be a reference to Captain Britain (a.k.a. Brian Braddock), Joe didn't seem quite as confident.
"I think we uh, maybe... or maybe it’s just a guy named Braddock [laughs]."
Some Scrapped Reunions On The Battlefield
"There’s always more beats to the battle, battles traditionally of this scale tend to be bloated. And then we try to pull them down to the very essential elements," Joe said when asked about deleted scenes.
"Sometimes when you get in the edit room and start playing around with it, the structure doesn’t sustain — or you find a better structure, and a better path through it. And some beats you think are gonna work don’t work quite as well as others, and then there’s sort of battle fatigue."
"I think there was like a Rocket and Groot reunion moment," he continued. "There might have been an Ant-Man and the Wasp reunion moment, but it just started to feel like an endless series of reunions where there are future movies coming, and those moments can be had in a different time."
Katherine Langford's Cut Role
Before the release of
Avengers: Endgame, we learned that Katherine Langford had been cast in an undisclosed role but she was nowhere to be seen in the movie itself. Now, the filmmakers have revealed that she was supposed to take on the role of an older Morgan Stark.
"There was an idea that we had where Tony was going to go the metaphysical way station where Thanos saw his daughter when he snapped his finger. There was going to be a future version of his daughter in that way station," they revealed.
"We showed it to a test audience, and it was really confusing."
"What we realized about it was we didn’t feel an emotional association with the adult version of his daughter. It wasn’t resonating with us on an emotional level which is why we moved away with it. His future daughter forgave him and gave him the peace to go,” the pair said of the cut scene." Here's hoping that makes its way on to the eventual Blu-ray release.
Captain America, No More
There's been a lot of speculation that Chris Evans might reprise the role of Captain America in a movie dealing with him travelling through time, but it sounds like the door is now closed on another appearance from the actor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
"No, I think Chris — Chris is a very emotional person," Joe explained.
"I think, maybe it’s evident if you follow him on Twitter — because he does put his heart into what he says — but I feel like he has to close the door on things and emotionally move onto the next thing."
Added Anthony, "There are no plans."
"I think for now he’s emotionally moved on, yes," concluded Joe.
Many thanks to ComicBook.com and the Happy Sad Confused podcast for the quotes used in this article.