SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses plot points for Avengers:Endgame, which came out almost a year ago but doesn’t it feel like 10 million lifetimes?!
For MCU fans, one of the most heartbreaking moments of Avengers: Endgame came when Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) journeyed to Vormir to retrieve the Soul Stone. Once there, they discovered that one of them had to die in order to get the stone, and the best friends fought to sacrifice themselves. Natasha Romanoff beat Clint Barton to the punch, diving off the cliff to ensure her best friend survived.
It’s a quietly devastating moment in noisy and fast-paced film, but in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Johansson revealed that the original ending was much darker.
Johansson described Natasha’s death on Vormir as a chase scene with an “army of Dementor-type creatures … I was thinking, ‘Parents will never forgive us for how these creatures look.’” Luckily, the team decided that not to go in that direction, and instead to focus on the gravity of the moment. “We wanted to leave [the audience] with the weight of that loss and the shock of it,” said Johansson.
Having Black Widow’s final moments be her being chased into the afterlife via Dementors, is a pretty damn dark ending. It means our final moments with the character are spent with her in fear, as opposed to the noble stoicism she displays when she lets go of Clint’s hand. The emotional impact of the scene is so much more resonant, and more befitting the death of one of the core Avengers.
(via Entertainment Weekly, image: Marvel)
How’s your social distancing going, Mary Suevians? Let us know what you’re reading/watching/playing!
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com