Avengers: Endgame will likely go down in history as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. Little can compare to the excitement and pure collective joy audiences felt experiencing the culminating chapter in the Infinity Saga. At the time of its release, the internet was saturated with videos of theaters full of fans celebrating key moments in the movie, such as Captain America lifting Thor's hammer, the Avengers coming back from the dead, and, of course, Steve Rogers' "Avengers Assemble" battle cry. There is little about that movie that people didn't like, but, as with any entertainment product, not everything about it landed perfectly.
Perhaps the film's most controversial moment came during its climactic final battle, in a sequence that's been come to be known simply as "A-Force." While trying to get the Infinity Gauntlet into Scott Lang's makeshift quantum portal, Spider-Man quickly found himself overwhelmed. This prompted Captain Marvel to take the gauntlet from him to escort it herself. Upon seeing the hordes of enemies standing in her way, Peter told Carol he didn't know how she was going to get through them. At that moment, Wanda Maximoff, Okoye, Wasp, Valkyrie, Gamora, and many other female heroes from the MCU arrived to back her up.
The scene was universally disliked, but surprisingly, not only by fans. It was even parodied in the "Girls Get it Done" scene in The Boys' Season 2 finale. Now, the pivotal sequence has been recreated in real life by none other than Captain Marvel's Brie Larson and WandaVision's Elizabeth Olsen themselves. The actresses attended San Antonio's Spaceon convention in October. In a photo session with fans dressed as Star-Lord, Spider-Man and Thanos, Olsen and Larson teamed up to bring the "A-Force" scene to life:
As a fun aside, Paul Bettany was also at the event, and recreated Vision's death by Thanos alongside Elizabeth Olsen.
Regarding the controversy surrounding A-Force, I've never been able to understand why the scene is so hated. It wasn't perfect, but that can be said about plenty of other scenes in comic book films. Overall, the scene was great. It was an exciting super-powered version of an escort mission, and it fit perfectly with the action-packed nature of the third act.
Going back to the impact "A-Force" had on the news cycle when Avengers: Endgame first released, The Boys creator Eric Kripke talked about the "Girls Get it Done" scene to The Hollywood Reporter in 2020. Kripke stated the sequence was actually born out of the frustration he and The Boys executive producer Rebecca Sonneshine shared about the A-Force scene:
"[With] 'girls get it done,' a lot of that came from our executive producer, Rebecca Sonneshine, who came in after the weekend Endgame opened. She was just furious. I saw it, too, and I was like, 'That was the dumbest, most contrived--' And she's like, 'Don't get me started.' She found it condescending and I agreed. So that just created for us a target, a satirical target. When there's something really ridiculous in either superhero or celebrity or Hollywood culture, we'll immediately go after it. It's an easy shot."
Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely also gave their take on the sequence. Speaking to Variety in 2019, Markus stated: "We had such an embarrassment of riches in that whole sequence. How do you make it not just a blur of people all the time? So, we found ways to sort of separate off certain units so you could focus. And Marvel fans, increasingly, with every movie, [have] gotten these great female characters. Some people can call it pandering but it's also like we have tons of shots of all men. Why not have a shot of all women and they're so cool? It just seemed like, 'Let's celebrate it!'"
McFeely then added that all female crew members and Marvel Studios employees were present during the filming of that movie, and they were all excited to see Captain Marvel and the rest of the MCU's female superheroes take center stage in a battle sequence:
"I remember on the day we shot that, every woman on the crew and in the offices came down and were sort of milling about behind the cameras. That was, perhaps, the most moving part of it for me, how important it was for everybody to see it. [...] They were pumped. There was a lot of pumped circumstances around it. I agree with [Christopher Markus]. We certainly thought long and hard about whether it had been earned. We really wanted most of these moments to be earned and not just a delightful piece of fan candy. Honestly, it made me nervous and sometimes, we would bring it up: 'Do we keep it? Do we not keep it?'"
Did you enjoy Larson and Olsen recreating the A-Force scene from Avengers: Endgame? Did you like the scene in the movie? Drop your thoughts in the comments.