Avengers: Endgame is the culmination of 11 years and more than 20 movies. It seems only fitting that the film's middle act revolved around the Avengers travelling back in time and revisiting some of their greatest battles. But as screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed, Endgame's time travel sequences almost went in a very different direction.

Avengers: Endgame Easter Eggs, Callbacks and Cameos 27 IMAGES

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In an interview with The New York Times, Markus and McFeely discussed the ways in which their original plans for Endgame's time travel locations changed during the writing process. It turns out that the duo didn't originally plan on revisiting the Battle of New York in 2012's The Avengers. Instead, the first draft featured Iron Man travelling to Asgard with Thor to collect the Aether and the Tesseract.McFeely said, "There’s a moment in the M.C.U., if you’re paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault. In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him." Marcus added that this draft featured significant interaction between Thor and Jane Foster.However, the writers admitted this original plan created too many storytelling complications, particularly when it came to the mission to retrieve the Orb on Morag. That first draft featured an entire underwater sequence on Morag that didn't make the final version."That was clever but it was just too big a set piece," said McFeely. "What that didn’t do is allow for Thanos and his daughters to get on the trail at the right moment. So we went back to when Peter Quill was there. And we realized that when you can punch Quill in the face, it’s hilarious. I still think it’s hilarious."Ultimately, the two overcame their earlier reluctance to feature the Battle of New York. McFeely credited co-director Joe Russo with helping to convince them. "Eventually, Joe Russo went, why are we going to this movie when we can go to 'Avengers?' Let’s make it work."Would you have liked to see Iron Man undertake a stealth mission in Asgard? Let us know what you think of these abandoned plot points in the comments below.

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