Avengers: Endgame Cut Two Pretty Wild Plots For Captain America
Is there any movie with more "movie" crammed into it than "Avengers: Endgame"? As the climax of The Infinity Saga, the film was tasked with capping off a shared narrative spread out across 21 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies released over 11 years. It's a film that goes from playing like the MCU's answer to "The Leftovers" to an "Ocean's Eleven"-styled assembling-the-heist-crew flick to a zippy time-travel adventure that sees characters stealthily revisiting their pasts like they're Marty McFly trying to avoid running into himself in "Back to the Future Part II." And that's all before the ginormous third-act battle, in which virtually everyone who's ever popped up in an MCU film before joins forces to collectively wail on the villainous Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his army for a solid half-hour (if not longer).
With so much material to draw from, it's no surprise to learn "Endgame" scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely chucked a whole lot more ideas at the wall than what made it into the seam-popping three-hour final cut of the film. Giving an example during a 2019 interview with Gothamist, Markus revealed, at one point, the pair had written scenes featuring a younger Thanos prior to the collapse of his home planet Titan. Fun as they were to write, he admitted they "weren't necessary" once the time came for them to start killing their darlings.
Then there were the ideas so outlandish the duo had forgotten actually brainstorming them in the first place. "Like I have here, [this note] says the 'Maltese cube: What if Loki or Thor got off Asgard with the cube?'" McFeely said. "So, yeah, the stuff that I just sort of completely forgot." That included not one but two rather wild storylines concerning Steve "America's Ass" Rogers himself, Captain America (Chris Evans).
Back to Cap's future
One of those subplots was described in Markus and McFeely's notes as simply "Steve Ages: Some dimensional horseplay could result in Steve Rogers aging to his actual hundred-year age." However, it was a whole other abandoned Captain America thread that really grabbed McFeely's attention during the interview:
"Holy crap, Chris, it says, 'Back to the Future: Steve somehow lands in 1945, realizes that he needs an Infinity Stone in order to return to the present. Fortunately, Howard Stark has fished it out of the North Atlantic.' [Laughs] So yeah, it really all stems from the manifesto."
It seems this story thread may have been an early prototype for a subplot that actually did make its way into "Endgame." The "Back to the Future"-y sequence in question sees Steve and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) make a quick detour to 1970, where Tony encounters the middle-aged version of his father Howard played by John Slattery. One can understand why Markus and McFeely originally had their eyes on sending Steve back to 1945, though. That would've seen him instead crossing paths with Dominic Cooper's Howard Stark, the younger iteration of the character the two writers introduced in "Captain America: The First Avenger" before spinning him off into the "Agent Carter" series (which they co-created).
Presumably, the deserted 1945 subplot would've also seen Steve getting a glimpse at Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), thus setting up their eventual happy ending. Ultimately, by going with the '70s thread, Markus and McFeely were able to kill two birds with one stone, laying the foundation for Peggy and Steve's reunion while also providing closure to Tony's relationship with his late father. It's that type of economic storytelling that prevents "Endgame" from collapsing under the sheer weight of its many, many moving parts.