Avengers: Endgame remains Marvel Studios' crowning achievement, and the movie's shadow has loomed large over the entire Multiverse Saga. Topping, or even matching, the heights of the 2019 blockbuster has proven near-impossible for the MCU.
Time will tell whether Avengers: Doomsday can accomplish what other recent titles couldn't. In the meantime, Hawkeye star Jeremy Renner has opened up on filming Black Widow's emotional death scene.
In Avengers: Endgame, Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff head to Vormir to retrieve the Soul Stone. However, the only way to get the ancient cosmic artefact necessary to defeat Thanos is for one of them to make the ultimate sacrifice; a soul for a soul.
Talking at the recent Space Con 2025 event, Renner reflected on shooting a completely different version of the sequence that saw the duo forced to fend off an attack from the 2014 Thanos Variant.
"We shot the scene, but that scene is not in the movie," he told fans. "It’s a very different scene. There’s much more galactic and more aliens and there’s a lot more stuff going on. And then we reshot it to make it much simpler to the scene that’s in the movie now."
"There’s much more emotional, much more impactful, I think. It’s more heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to do that scene," the actor said of the version seen in the final cut. "It was a celebration also. It’s like saying goodbye to somebody. There was 22 films before this that made this scene happen."
"I think it’s one of Scarlett’s last scenes anyway. It was a pretty emotional time, a lot of years had gone by, and shared stories, and life shared. It was real enough for us to feel it," Renner concluded.
The alternate version he's talking about can be found on Disney+ among the other deleted scenes. Still, it's interesting to hear Renner's take on that and why it was beneficial to reshoot such a huge moment. Co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have also discussed the change, describing the final version as "much better than what we had."
McFeely continued, "It was a little more complicated. It was Thanos sending a small army to pretend to try and stop them. It was sort of awkward. It was overthinking."
"While it lit a fire under them to do the act, it also took a little bit of the agency away, and we lost the characters," Markus pointed out.
Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will likely undergo similarly extensive reshoots, and Marvel Studios has given the Russo Brothers plenty of time to make sure both movies are as good as possible. Whether they can come close to Avengers: Endgame remains to be seen.
Back to Renner, and he later recalled Avengers: Endgame's emotional opening—where Clint's family literally vanishes before his eyes during the Blip—being a scene he'd originally shot for the previous movie.
"That scene was supposed to be at the end of Infinity War," he shared. "It was supposed to be at the end of Infinity War, and then it goes into Ronin land. But then it didn’t work. So, let’s just bookend this whole thing. A lot of things happen in Endgame, guys. A lot of things. So, Ronin comes into play because of what happens to his family, and the blip and all that stuff."
Avengers: Endgame is now streaming on Disney+.