The Disney/Fox deal may be complete, but it seems as if Marvel Studios will be taking its time bringing characters from the worlds of the
X-Men and
Fantastic Four to the big screen. Kevin Feige has previously been quoted as saying that we may be waiting as long as five years for them to appear (meaning they would be part of Phase 5 rather than the already planned out Phase 4).
Regardless, the subject of the X-Men inevitably came up during a recent interview with
Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and when they were asked who they would choose to write a movie for, the former zeroed in on one member of the team, in particular.
"Yeah I've always wanted to see Cyclops done with some respect," he revealed, echoing the feelings of pretty much every comic book fan out there.
"Feel he's gotten a raw deal."
Bryan Singer only ever really used Scott Summers as the third wheel of an uninteresting love triangle, and fans were left fuming when he was casually killed off in
X-Men: The Last Stand. While Tye Sheridan has done a solid job as the hero, it still doesn't feel like he's playing the Cyclops from the comics and it's now up to the MCU to set things right (with these writers, if we're lucky).
Find out more from the Avengers: Endgame writers about that film
and the MCU's future by clicking on the "View List" button below!
We Almost Got A Third Version Of Thor
In the movie, Captain America ends up coming face to face with the 2012 version of himself and they proceed to trade blows in what proves to be an evenly matched battle. Asked if it was always going to be Steve Rogers who runs his older self, Markus reveals that we almost got to see Thor's reaction to learning that he eventually winds up in a very dark place.
"We may have at one time had Dark World Thor catch sight of Endgame Thor and go, you know, "What the hell happened?" But it got too complex and it distracted from things," he says before McFeely jumps in by pointing out "That would have been a third version of Thor in this movie, you know?"
The End For Captain America And Iron Man
Avengers: Endgame concludes with Iron Man dying after making the ultimate sacrifice to stop Thanos, and Captain America growing old in the past with his one true love, Peggy Carter. Was it always the plan for their respective stories to wrap up like that, though? According to McFeely, yes.
"We're very excited by this. If you look back at the MCU, that Steve and Tony have been on different paths towards becoming the fullest versions of themselves. And Steve's arc is about trying to find some personal life, you know? Like he's been a man for others for so long, when does he get to be a man for himself? And how is that not selfish? How is that just earned?
"And Tony goes from sort of self-interested playboy to a man for others. A man willing to lay his life down. And so they sort of cross in the middle in Civil War, and the natural end of those arcs seemed to be Tony laying down his life, you know, flying over the wire as it were, and Steve going and getting a life. So where we hit upon it was in order to become their best selves, Steve had to find a life, and Tony had to lose his."
Iron Man Vs. Heimdall
Before deciding to take Earth's Mightiest Heroes back to the events of
The Avengers, it seems that the events of
Thor: The Dark World were going to receive the majority of screentime in Endgame. While that may sound disappointing on the surface, it would have actually led to a pretty epic sounding battle between Iron Man and Heimdall!
"Yeah, our first draft was a version where Tony and Thor go to Asgard, because I like the idea of Tony going, like, in theory going to Asgard and seeing science versus magic, and stuff like that," McFeely explains.
"And then he fought Heimdall, who could of course see him even though Tony had an invisible stealth suit on or something.
"So at the end of Dark World you might remember that Volstagg and Sif go to the Collector and pass off the Reality Stone because they don't want to keep two stones in one place. So that was one attempt at it, and I think Joe Russo read it and he goes, "Why aren't we going to Avengers? It's only the most exciting movie." And so we went yep, let's do that."
The Scientific Explanation For Endgame's Time-Travel
The time-travel elements of Avengers: Endgame are still being debated, and more than likely will be for years to come. What a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that it's a superhero movie and overthinking it just seems like a waste of, well, time.
For what it's worth, though, the writers did consult some experts and have now provided a very interesting (and possibly confusing) take on how this mechanic works in the MCU. Here's what McFeely says about the method they chose to use for
Endgame:
"We brought in a couple of physicists who, to a man, said, "I'm glad you brought me in, because I've always wanted to talk to people from Hollywood to say that you know I love Back to the Future as much as the next person, but we don't think that's how it would work." Which was also helpful for us because as you can imagine, every time we went back to one of ... you know we have six different time heists in three or four different periods ... if every time you went back you created a new Biff's Casino, for want of a better term, right? Another crack in the version of your timeline? We would never get out of the second act
"So for us the strongest thing we could do, and the most helpful thing we could do, is to operate under some kind of branch reality, so that the things that have already happened ... which is what ... again, it's time travel which is humanly impossible, but a number of physicists had told us it's much more likely we would operate in a branch reality than a singular timeline. So that's the floor for the time travel conversation."
A Conflicting Captain America Theory
The Russo Brothers were recently quoted as saying that Steve Rogers lived his life out in an alternate past before returning to the original timeline to pass the shield and mantle of Captain America on to Sam Wilson. Markus, however, doesn't seem to agree with the "alternate reality" theory as he dubs it.
"That is our theory," he says when asked if there were two Captain Americas in existence for a time.
"We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline. So I reject the "Steve is in an alternate reality" theory."
"I do believe that there is simply a period in world history from about '48 to now where there are two Steve Rogers," he continues, further confusing matters. "And anyway, for a large chunk of that one of them is frozen in ice. So it's not like they'd be running into each other."
The Dead Remain Dead
Bruce Banner points out that he tried and failed to bring Natasha back when he used the Infinity Gauntlet, but is there a chance that the second Snap resurrected the likes of Black Widow and Loki?
"No, I mean we only brought back the people who were effectively disintegrated by the Snap at the end of Infinity War," Markus confirms.
"Anybody who died over the course of the movie through neck-snapping or stabbing or being thrown off a cliff or having a Mind Stone torn out of their head stayed dead." That means The Vision is still gone, so who knows how he returns on Disney+!
Black Widow's Sacrifice
In
Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow fights Hawkeye for the chance to be the one to sacrifice herself in exchange for the Soul Stone as she believes her life has been building up to this point.
However, with a solo movie set to be released for the character next year and Hawkeye's habit of dying in the comic books, did McFeely every consider having Clint be the one to perish?
"Well, you know the rules of the Soul Stone. So, of our group, I guess you could make an argument you could send Smart Hulk and Natasha. But we've always felt that the platonic love between Natasha and Clint is pretty evergreen. And when they get to that moment and he now has so much red in his ledger... we liked this idea that she was the last one on the wall, right? That she had found her purpose and her family in Avengers and could not give that up, and would not, much like Steve Rogers ... or I should say like an older Steve Rogers. This Steve Rogers is despairing in a way, right? Maybe we should stop, but she won't.
"So we've always thought that the most perfect conclusion to her arc would be to die for her new family, or to sacrifice greatly for her new family. We toyed with not doing that, and we had another version, and several women on the crew said, "Don't you dare take that choice away from her. The heroic thing is for Natasha to do it, not for Hawkeye to do it." And so we listened to that. Yeah."
Jane Foster's Return
We know that some camera trickery was involved with Natalie Portman's return as Jane Foster, as old footage from
The Dark World was used along with a new line of dialogue she recorded but was she always set to play a role here? Apparently so, according to McFeely.
"It was very hard to find a way to not do that, seeing as one of the Infinity Stones is inside her for primarily the only time we've ever seen it. It's literally inside her arm, so there weren't too many variations that didn't have Natalie Portman in them," he reveals.
"There were longer ones, but they ... you know you wound up before Thor and his mother was so rich and so on point in terms of what he needed to learn that in already a three-hour movie we couldn't really have a long scene between, say, Rocket and Jane, because, again, it's drifting off of the character stories that we wanted to tell."
Why Howard Stark Made An Appearance
In a very unexpected twist, Captain America and Iron Man travel back to 1970 and the latter encounters his father just weeks before he's set to be born. It makes for an emotional moment in the film, and McFeely reveals that they always wanted to return to this period as a way of wrapping up the issues Tony had with Howard (which they also touched on in
Captain America: Civil War).
"We knew that we wanted a sort of no-going-back hiccup to happen during at least one of the time-heist journeys. So when we knew that Henry Pym and Howard Stark had sort of a friction relationship back in the day, and Peggy Carter helped found S.H.I.E.L.D, and that there was undoubtedly a time when they were all together, if you decided that they were out of Pim Particles and had only one way to go, that was pretty delightful. And it was going to be able to hit a bunch of buttons. Remember, all the journeys sort of allow each character to deal with emotional stuff, and obviously Tony always had daddy issues."
The Falcon Is The New Captain America
As we mentioned,
Avengers: Endgame wraps up with Steve Rogers handing his shield over to Sam Wilson. so does that officially mean he's the new Captain America?
"As far as we know, yeah," McFeely states before his writing parter interjects with,
"Certainly seems like it to me."
Well, that's a rather definitive answer and one that should shake up that planned Disney+ TV series...
How The MCU Is Forever Changed
After hinting that
Spider-Man: Far From Home will have to find a way to deal with the five-year time-jump by explaining that many of Peter Parker's classmates have now grown up, McFeely went on to make it clear that the MCU is a very different - and potentially damaged world - moving forward.
"Oh for sure, it's the Marvel Universe as far as we know is five years ahead of where it was at the end of Infinity War. Full stop. Period. Yes. It is a big swing, it's complicated, it means that half of the planet basically has either lost five years or lived through a terrible five years. Yes, that's the MCU going forward."
Will We See A New Iron Man?
Gwyneth Paltrow has strongly indicated that she's now done in the MCU so what becomes of Iron Man if Rescue won't be there to fill the void?
"Ooh, well there certainly are a bunch of people with suits who are alive," Markus teases before McFeely adds:
"But we don't know what they've got planned."
So, as Markus points out, perhaps don't read too much into that appearance from Harley Keener.
"Yeah, there are no Iron Teen scripts as far as I know."
Could Steve Rogers Return?
Over the past week, fans have made it clear they would love to see a movie delving into Captain America's time in the past to find out what exactly he was up to. Asked if there's a chance that could happen, Markus says,
"Possibly. I think maybe all I did was Steve was a stay-at-home dad and Peggy went to work at S.H.I.E.L.D. I don't know that there were any adventures."
Is Thor A Guardian Of The Galaxy Now?
"Ask Peter Quill," Markus responds when asked the question above. As for McFeely, all he will say is
"Yeah, you might have to ask James [Gunn] or Quill." He's totally a Guardian now but whether he's the leader is definitely a question that will be answered further down the line.