Not to make him too Christ-like, but it was like, “If I’ve got to die, I can die now.” We were just banging our heads for weeks, and at some point, Trinh Tran went, “Can’t we just kill him?” And we all went, “What happens if you just kill him? Why would you kill him? Why would he let you kill him?” MARKUS It reinforced Thanos’s agenda. Why was that important? McFEELY We always had this problem. “Endgame” sort of tricks you by having the heroes kill Thanos almost immediately, only to discover it doesn’t solve anything. So that if you were a big fan of Doctor Strange or Black Panther or Bucky or Sam, you’re only going to get a little brief window on them. It meant that we were likely going to bring people back late. Avengers, and let’s give them their due.

So the question is, is it early in the second movie? Late in the second movie? You notice the players left on the board are the O.G.

STEPHEN McFEELY Another big plot point is when everyone comes back. And if we did it too early in the first movie, it would be a bit of an anticlimax after you’ve killed half the universe to have them stumbling around for half an hour. And we realized fairly early on that if we didn’t do it at the end of the first movie, the first movie wasn’t going to have an end. How did you decide where the major events of “Infinity War” and “Endgame” would fall? CHRISTOPHER MARKUS The biggest point was probably the Snap. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. In a recent interview in their offices in Los Angeles, Markus and McFeely discussed the many choices and possibilities of “Endgame,” the roads not taken and the decisions behind who lived and who died. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) sacrifices her life a colossal battle ensues Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) dies and Captain America (Chris Evans) finds a way to live the life he’d always wanted, reappearing as an old man to entrust his shield to the Falcon (Anthony Mackie). When the story resumes five years later, the Avengers are still left with their grief and remorse - until the unexpected return of Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) kicks off a race back through time to retrieve the Infinity Stones before Thanos could obtain them in the first place. In the three-hour span of “Endgame,” the Avengers confront and kill Thanos (Josh Brolin), who had used the Infinity Gauntlet to snap away half of all life in the universe. And some of the heroes we’ve followed on this decade-long adventure are gone, too. With “Avengers: Endgame,” the two-movie story line that started with “Avengers: Infinity War” is finished, along with the 22-film cycle that represents the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. This article contains spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame.”

Infinity war movie plot