How That Female Avengers Scene Came Together for 'Endgame'

Co-director Anthony Russo says the girl-power moment was always destined for the final cut: "That's one idea that stayed with us for a long time."

You know that scene in Avengers: Endgame when (spoiler alert!) all the Avengers with two X chromosomes — Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Okoye (Danai Gurira), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Shuri (Letitia Wright), the Wasp (Evangeline Lily), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) — banded together to march into battle?

Turns out that sequence was part of the movie's reshoots. The reason it got filmed so late is unclear — it may have simply been because of scheduling complexities — but co-director Anthony Russo says the girl-power moment was always destined for the final cut.

"The number of ideas that we want to put into these movies is always far greater than the space available to realize them," he tells THR. "That's one of the ideas that stayed with us for a long time, and maybe we had tried different versions of it here and there throughout the story, and this was the particular, specific version of it that ended up working for the narrative."

A version of this story first appeared in the May 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.