The Avengers: Endgame portal scene might not have started as awe-inspiring and appropriately grandiose as fans might assume.

Avengers: Endgame is the second part of a two-part finale to the tens of films in the MCU franchise. The project had to follow up from the masterfully handled Infinity War and justify less central projects like Captain Marvel. Despite having almost unreal fan expectations to live up to, Avengers: Endgame was a raging success that ruined two-part finales with its sheer critical and fan acclaim on release while shattering box office records.

Avengers: Endgame features a contender for the best scene in the MCU, the portal scene at the film’s climax, which saw all the heroes step out onto the battlefield in a cinematic spectacle that many fans rank as their favorite part of the film. However, this masterpiece wasn’t picture-perfect from the first draft to filming. “It was interesting because there was a lot of different ideas,” Marvel VFX supervisor Dan Deleeuw revealed in an interview with ComicBook. “There was a version of the cut, the day that we had all the actors together, and it was like this long panning shot across all the actors. It was the day that everyone was there and it was like this giant, expensive in essentiality you had all the actors there, but it just didn’t play as well as we wanted.”

“We knew who survived and when they were coming back, but we needed to slow it down and give the audience a chance to welcome their heroes back. And so it was so interesting in terms of like, ‘Okay, who comes from Titan first? Okay, you get the Guardians and then Star-Lord’s going to show up.’ And then just being in the theater that day, it’s like starting, okay, we got to do Spider-Man last because Spider-Man!” Deleeuw added. “So it was very much crafted to be emotional, and I think it was amazing for all of us that opening weekend, how well the fans responded to it.” This attention to crafting the project is part of why it remains untouched by any other MCU project, even after Spider-Man: No Way Home beat Avengers: Infinity War‘s box office debut and convinced some that it would dethrone Avengers: Endgame.

Unsurprisingly, such a fan-favorite moment took careful planning and multiple tries to get right. The sense of scale and sheer excitement that the scene elicited in fans is also partly responsible for the drastic fall in interest from fans, as the entirety of the MCU following that high point seems anticlimactic to many. If star Jonathan Majors’ current troubles are amicably sorted, then Kang could be a better MCU villain than Thanos and potentially coax a similar amount of success from the currently in-decline franchise. With appearances in big-budget movies and Disney Plus shows already under his belt, there’s certainly a more involved effort to bring Majors’ antagonist to the forefront.

With Avengers: Secret Wars potentially being an MCU reboot, there are chances for more Endgame-level events and more elaborate and impressive scenes like the one discussed here. It will be interesting for fans to see how the crew behind the scenes at Marvel Studios can use past experiences to build bigger and better spectacles for the future.

Avengers: Endgame is currently available for streaming on Disney Plus.

Source: ComicBook