One of the fun aspects about covering the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that some of the actors are very bad about keeping secrets, often revealing spoilers in the middle of live TV interviews (we’re looking at you Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo). To combat this, the producers of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame have gone as far as restricting access to scripts, using fake scripts, or filming fake endings.
For Endgame, directors Anthony and Joe Russo revealed they’ve filmed as many as five different endings to the Avengers finale in order to throw people off. The brothers also revealed that the actual ending of the movie was decided upon before they started writing the script for Infinity War.
According to an interview with E! News (found via /film and Heroic Hollywood), actor Mark Ruffalo (aka Hulk/Bruce Banner) ‘accidentally’ let one of the fake endings for Endgame leak.
“I shot, like, five different endings to this movie. I didn’t even get a whole script of this movie. I don’t know why. The script I did get had dummy scenes in it. He [pointing to Chris Evans] gets married in this!”
Who knows? That could be the real ending. Of course, Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) could possibly get married to Emily VanCamp’s Sharon Carter (although we’re told she’s not in Endgame). But there would have to be a lot of on-screen foundation building to make it seem like a marriage was a natural part of the story.
In another interview, this time with Collider, the directors talked about how the real ending for Endgame was figured out in the original pitch for the two-film Avengers finale.
“When we were working on both Infinity War and Endgame, the first thing we did was break the ending of Endgame. Because we wanted to know where we were going. It’s very hard to tell a story if you don’t know where you’re going. So we have a very specific process with [the writers] where we spent months in a room just talking about a three-page outline. Literally, page one is act one, page two is act two, page three is act three. Because you have to know in a contained document like that, ‘Here’s where we start, here’s what happens in the middle, here’s where it ends.’ If you know that, it’s a lot easier to get to script. A more malleable format to work in a short outline like that, spend your time talking about it and thinking it through. We knew fairly early on how this was gonna end.”
In discussing the extended clip for Endgame that was released yesterday, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige revealed that Brie Larson actually filmed her scenes for Endgame before she started work on Captain Marvel. That gives you some idea of the enormous post-production work involved in Endgame, but it also means the Carol Danvers we’ve just seen on-screen in Captain Marvel might be a little different from the one we see in Endgame as her performance had time to evolve..
The big question remaining now is can Avengers: Endgame crack the $300 million mark at the domestic box office. That would beat the current record holder Avengers: Infinity War which is a top the list with $257.7 million. Add in the global box office totals and Endgame could open between $800M and $900M, also a record.
With record breaking pre-sales and a wide global opening, the only thing standing between Endgame and the record books is the 3 hour and 2 minute length of the movie. Add in time for trailers and cleaning theatres and cinemas will have to open extra screens to make sure there are enough butts in seats every day from Thursday night previews through Sunday.
Can Disney and Marvel Studios pull it off? We’ll know in less than three weeks.
Are you ready for Avengers: Endgame? It opens in theaters almost everywhere on April 26, 2019.