A Marvel Movie Without Kevin Feige's Involvement Influenced Avengers: Endgame

It's been six years since "Avengers: Endgame" was released, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has not come close to replicating the level of emotional pay-off of that movie, which culminated an entire decade's worth of MCU storytelling on the big screen. Its gargantuan box office conquest was inevitable, and not easily duplicated.

Achieving the sheer level of spectacle in that movie, which manages to tell a compelling time-travel story while also building to a titanic, world-shaking battle featuring dozens of characters, is no easy task. That the movie also got to conclude the story of the original Avengers in a mostly satisfying way, with powerful send-offs to Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) that paid off the previous decade of the MCU remains this franchise's biggest singular accomplishment, even if Jon Favreau tried to stop the latter from happening.

When the MCU started, superheroes retiring, dying, or otherwise having their stories end definitively was practically inconceivable. Sure, by the time the first "Avengers" came out, Christopher Nolan effectively retired his Batman in "The Dark Knight Rises," but that's less surprising considering the audience knew the story of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne was always going to be limited, especially compared to the ongoing MCU.

So when the time came to conclude the story of Tony Stark in "Avengers: Endgame," Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige surprisingly took inspiration from a beloved and acclaimed comic book movie he did not work on. That movie was "Logan."

Speaking on the "Assembled: The Making of Deadpool and Wolverine" documentary on Disney+, Kevin Feige talked about how "Logan" became a blueprint for the way they approached the story of "Avengers: Endgame."

"I had always been very vocal with Hugh [Jackman] that he had one of the best endings of any fictional character ever," Feige said. "And I told him that is so amazing, what he was able to accomplish in 'Logan.' That's what we were striving for with Robert Downey Jr. in 'Endgame,' is to give this incredible, iconic fictional character an amazing ending."

It's easy to see how "Logan" paved the way for Tony Stark's story in "Endgame," as it was a movie that was all about taking a character from a long-running story and giving that tale a satisfying conclusion. "Logan" was not part of a trilogy with a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather a standalone movie that was also the epilogue to the original "X-Men" trilogy and the previous two Wolverine movies. "Logan" treated its world with gravitas, sentimentality, and sincerity even if it was quite bleak. That movie made the audience feel the weight of nearly 20 years of "X-Men" stories, which make Logan's death one of the best moments in superhero cinema.

"Logan" showed how effective superhero movie endings could be. Yet it was "Endgame" that showed how one could end an ongoing movie franchise while still leave the door open to new stories. As we head to another big reset in the MCU, Feige might do well to remember what inspired his biggest success.