It’s not every day that the #1 movie at the box office is seven years old, but Avengers: Endgame is not your everyday movie. The 2019 Marvel hit is literally one of the highest-grossing movies ever, and its recent re-release is just adding to that total. It’s also bringing the film back into the cultural conversation, and one of its writers just revealed some surprising details on a massive spoiler.
Speaking at a recent Q&A, one of the film’s writers, Stephen McFeely (who wrote the script with Christopher Markus), spoke about the choice to kill Black Widow over Hawkeye. It was a huge decision for a lot of reasons and not one they came to lightly. In fact, the writers even tried a version where it was Hawkeye dying instead and got some major pushback.
“It’s not a small thing to kill off a principal female character in the MCU,” McFeely said (via Forbes). “We tried a version of Hawkeye [dying] and a number of the female employees at Marvel, when they read [the script], grabbed me in the hallway and said, ‘Don’t you do this to her. Don’t you take her heroic moment and give it to him.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s a really good point.'”
That it was Black Widow and Hawkeye searching for the Soul Stone, which would require one of them to die, was a big decision unto itself.
“There was a sense of dread over the decision. ‘Okay, we’re going to go to New York—great. We’re going to go to Asgard—great. We’re going to go to Vormir—that’s bad,” McFeely said. “So, in the design, we needed to make sure that two people who loved each other went, and [Black Widow and Hawkeye] were the obvious pairing. So, even though it’s a platonic relationship, they’ve been together as a duo in the Avengers the whole time.”
But, in the end, it just felt like the right decision for Widow’s overall arc. “In our mind, it was always going to be [Black Widow] because she was, I would argue, the greater hero in some ways, but selfishly, just as part of what my job is, I want to make you feel the worst you can feel,” McFeely said, jokingly. “But also, in the big picture, she’s got red in her ledger, and she’s been trying to make up for that her entire life. That’s why when she found the Avengers, they were a new family for her. So, this idea that she could save her family, in the greater sense of that, was really important.”
So important, in fact, that the film makes a point to mention it several more times, even as Thanos reemerges, the Avengers get in their biggest battle ever, and Tony Stark sacrifices himself as well.
“We were mentioning her all over the ending of the movie, where Hulk says, ‘I tried to bring her back,’ and Hawkeye is lamenting her loss with the Scarlet Witch,” McFeely said. “It was about the best we could have done, given there was another character that was going to sacrifice himself.”
Do you think killing Black Widow was the right call? Let us know below.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
