SALT LAKE CITY — “Avengers: Endgame” almost had a seriously dark scene involving skulls, Captain America’s head and a victorious Thanos.
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige recently told Empire that the staff wanted to include a scene straight from the "Infinity Gauntlet" comic book collection that included Thanos sitting on a throne of skulls. That’s right. In the comics, Thanos, having achieved his goal of wiping out half of the universe’s population, sits on a throne of skulls to celebrate his win.
Details about this scene first leaked back in July while the “Endgame” writers spoke at the San Diego Comic-Con panel, according to ComicBook.com.
But Feige told Empire the production staff worked to get the scene into the film. The immediate thought was adding it right after the Avengers came back from their time heist adventure.
“I think there are behind the scenes pictures of this, us having the giant omnibus of the Infinity Gauntlet comic collection and saying, we need to do justice to this,” he told Empire. “One of those images was Thanos sitting on a throne of skulls, ruling over everything and we wanted to get that in there. One of the ideas was, when they finish the time heist, they returned to a world (in 2023) that Thanos had already conquered, that involved all of that, the throne made of bones and skulls and had him tossing, like a bowling ball, Captain America’s severed skull head, still in the cowl, to Captain America.”
So what happened? Well, Feige said the scene was “pretty cool, but the logic to get there defeated us.”
The scene would have certainly led to a darker “Avengers: Endgame” than what we saw. Uproxx writer Josh Kupp suggested the scene would have been akin to Luke Skywalker stumbling upon his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's burned bodies in “Star Wars: A New Hope.”
“They’re the good guys! They’re not supposed to die in such brutal fashion!”