Avengers: Infinity War co-writer Stephen McFeely says he and co-writer Christopher Markus only zeroed in on the idea to have Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) paged by an unseen Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in “probably the second or third draft” of Infinity War’s script.

“I think at one point we thought we’d shoot it somewhere like a train station. So we did a version of that where Nick Fury was between trains,” McFeely told Backstory Magazine.

“I don’t even remember where the idea came from. We were handed a job to write two movies out of four, and we knew we could kindly request certain things of those two movies in between [Infinity War and Endgame] that would help lay out the chessboard for our movies. There are bigger puzzles than even just two.”

Because Fury at the time hadn’t been seen since 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron before making his cameo appearance in the end credit stinger of Infinity War, was there a version of Avengers: Endgame that had Fury assemble alongside the other Avengers in the final fight against Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his army?

“No. God, I mean, how much did you see Winter Soldier in that battle?” McFeely said. “That’s the thing — we sort of got to a point where you’re just technically people shooting, you know? So I don’t know if we ever had Nick Fury in it.”

Fury’s brief appearance in Endgame, as a silent attendee at the funeral for Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), was part of what Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige called “the year of Fury.”

“Sam was very funny in this roundtable we did talking about how he’d disappeared for a while. He shows up in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and then he’s not in Captain America: Civil War and hadn’t been in a number of the movies for a while,” Feige previously told BET.

“I remember meeting with him two years ago and saying, ‘I know it’s been a while, Sam. Here is our plan. 2019 is going to be the year of Fury.’ And we walked him through young, two-eyed Fury in Captain Marvel, the one poignant shot of him in Endgame and seeing him in [Spider-Man: Far From Home]. And it’s fun now to see the year of Fury complete.”

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