Many Marvel fans were not okay after the conclusion of the Avengers arc, trying and failing to work through the loss of Tony Stark, as Robert Downey Jr. became an Earth-saving playboy in real life. But a smaller subset of MCU-heads were put off by the finale for other reasons. Specifically, they wanted to know what happened between The Hulk and Black Widow in between films to cause them to cast aside their budding relationship.
The pair seemed well on their way to a romantic partnership at the tail end of Age of Ultron. In between the two films, those feelings dissolved into nothingness, Thanos-snap style, with neither character addressing why.
Now an Avengers: Endgame writer is spilling on why the last movie left Bannanoff by the wayside. On an episode of the Empire podcast, Stephen McFeely said that the relationship was left on the cutting-room floor.
“We certainly tried [to continue the story],” McFeely said. “In Infinity War we had scenes — we wrote them, we shot them — of them sort of hashing that out."
McFeely said that the relationship they planned was just as doomed in the script.
"It was ‘You’ve been gone, I’ve moved on,’ that kind of stuff," McFeely said. "But it became very clear that, if a scene was not in the ‘A-plot,’ it would not survive to the end of Infinity War.”
The movie already clocked in at over three hours, which Klay Thompson can testify is too long for a superhero movie. And McFeely didn't want to make the final product any longer.
"That thing had to be on rails just to get to the finish line," McFeely said. "You couldn’t wrap up loose threads just because you wanted to."
