Here's The Comic Book Easter Eggs The 'Avengers: Endgame' Writers Wanted To Include (But Couldn't)
Despite being roughly as long as Laurence of Arabia, Pearl Harbor, and Gone With The Wind combined, it turns out Avengers: Endgame was nearly crammed with a whole lot more storylines pulled from the comic books.
According to writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, the House of M comic book storyline—in which Scarlet Witch loses the plot a bit and creates a new reality around herself—was under serious consideration for Endgame, and there could have been another hero drawn from the comics created within the plot.
"I remember going through several scenarios of Nova," Markus told the Hollywood Reporter. "Thanos could come and kill all the Nova Corps, except one guy: Richard Rider, who then becomes… I think in that scenario he became the herald, kind of like the Hulk was [when he crashed into the Dr Strange's New York mansion in Infinity War]. Someone who could come out and tell people.
"We had everything. Literally every variation we could think of or that was sitting there in the comics untapped. With absolutely no value placed next to them."
McFeely concurred: "We may have inherently said this is a five-star idea, this is a one-star idea, but we tried not to present that to the group."
It wasn't just McFeely and Markus who Kevin Feige came to a pre-production meeting in Atlanta with a raft of classic comic book images to hand so they could be worked into the look and direction of the film, and McFeely remembers Feige pushing for the inclusion of nods to Faust-like devil Mephisto, asking: "Could we make sure Ebony Maw is more Mephisto-y?"
Everyone's pretty certain that this is very much the end of the line for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it's been up to this point, though McFeely would be tempted back for a House of M storyline—though as he noted, "you've got to earn it".
This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk.
* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
