Avengers: Endgame served as a fitting, emotional conclusion to Marvel Studios' Infinity Saga, and injected some real stakes into the story by killing off a couple of major characters.
Both Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) sacrificed themselves so that their teammates could undo Thanos' "snap" and eradicate The Mad Titan and his forces once and for all, but it sounds like things could have been a lot more bleak for Earth's Mightiest Heroes!
While speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, directors Joe and Anthony Russo revealed that Kevin Feige actually pitched them on an idea which involved taking all six original Avengers off the board.
"We thought it was way too aggressive and that the audience wouldn’t be able to process it, and that in fact picking one or two characters to make sacrifices throughout the movie might give you moments throughout the film where the action could stop and you could have emotional catharsis and then continue with the narrative and then have more emotional catharsis," said Joe.
"Kevin early on had pitched this idea that it was like Toy Story 3 where they should all actually jump into the fire in order to save the universe, and we thought you have to step out storytelling on something of this scale, so we weren’t quite sure how the math would add up to get to that."
Anthony clarified that this was "very early" days and never actually made it into any draft of the script, so this was probably just Feige spit-balling. Still, it's not hard to understand why the brothers weren't exactly enthusiastic about the idea of wiping out the entire team.
Although Steve Rogers' part in the ongoing tale did also come to an end (for the time being, at least), Thor, Bruce Banner and Hawkeye played important roles in The MCU following the events of Endgame, so we're glad that Toy Story 3 idea didn't come to fruition!