'Endgame' Almost Featured Thanos Traveling Back in Time to Decapitate One of the Avengers

On Friday, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely held a panel to talk about their experiences working on the huge Marvel films. The discussion included what didn't make it to the screen, highlighting just how much had to be cut despite the combined running time of five and a half hours.

"We were working on different ways to bring Thanos into the present day because we had killed the present-day Thanos but we had activated the past-Thanos," Markus explained to Hall H. "He, being Thanos, knowing it would take Nebula some time to rejigger the time machine. He went down to his present-day Earth which would be 2014 and wiped it out, and killed the Avengers."

That idea saw Thanos come through the time machine that Nebula had been working on with the head of Captain America from a different timeline. They added that he would use the head to taunt modern day Steve Rogers, gloating along the lines of, "I killed you, again, what are you gonna do about it?"

They also revealed during the panel that the post-snap reunion that comes in the third act of Endgame was almost completely different.

"We had one where they all come back to the compound. Boom, there they are, you hear, 'Mr Stark' and there’s Peter coming around the corner," McFeely said. "And then we cut five minutes and they’re all eating pizza. It was terrible."

With such a large amount of story to fit into both the films, they had a lot to wrap-up in the third act of Endgame. To showcase just how much work went into crafting the end of the Infinity Saga, they showed their intimidating story map to the crowd. They refused to reveal whether there are two Captain Americas alive in the current storyline following his reunion with Peggy Carter, however.