AVENGERS: ENDGAME Writers Reveal Deleted Scene Where Hulk Fights Bruce Banner in Doctor Strange's Mindscape

I love how after all this time since Avengers: Endgame was released we are still getting cool new information about the film that we didn’t know about before.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely reveal some exciting Endgame alternate story concepts that didn’t find their way into the final cut of the film. One of those scenes included a battle in Doctor Strange’s mindscape where the heroes fought themselves. They specifically detailed a scene in which Bruce Banner fights The Hulk!

Before we get to that, the writers talked about how they hung up baseball-style cards with all of the Marvel characters they were playing with as they were developing this epic story. This is how that worked:

McFeely: On one wall is Movie One, and one wall is Movie Two, and the third wall has baseball cards of all the Marvel characters, and we could move them around …

VF: Are they actual collectible cards?

McFeely: They’re all in my dresser. I think I’ll hold onto them for a while.

VF: I mean, are they specially made for this? One of a kinds? Or the kind anyone could buy commercially?

McFeely: Marvel makes them. Yeah. Some intern in-house makes them. They have a magnet on the back. They get dog-eared and bent and stuff. [Each one] says if we have them or not for this movie. And there was a little rating. We didn’t know how much [money] each actor made, but it had either one dollar sign or up to five dollar signs.

VF: So you would keep in mind how much they cost to be in the movie?

McFeely: It was sort of just a guideline.

Markus: They would allow us to do anything in anybody’s contract. We’d get to renegotiate it as needed, but it was a fascinating glimpse into the other side.

VF: Was Marvel ever like, “There are too many dollar signs in this scene?”

Markus: No, it was, “You better damn well have a good story for us!”

McFeely: You actually try not to leave the five-dollar-signs on the sidelines.

As for the ideas that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, this is where they tell us about that interdimensional Hulk and Banner fight sequence that probably would have been awesome! They also share an alternate take on Hulk’s storyline:

Markus: There was a sequence in [Infinity War] where they went into the places in the Doctor Strange universe called the Mindscape and everyone faces themselves. It was great but had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

VF: Faced themselves, as in battled themselves?

McFeely: Banner meets the Hulk, I think in the arena from Ragnarok. Only one of them was getting out of there, and then that one showed up in Wakanda [in Infinity War] and he had merged. That merging that currently happens in [Endgame] in a diner, and he’s eating a huge stack of pancakes? That initially happened at the end of Infinity War.

VF: How did that alternate version play out?

McFeely: The Hulk refuses to come out, if you remember, and [in the discarded storyline] they eventually came to a realization or a compromise and he busted out of the Iron Man suit and beats the heck out of this [monster]. That whole Third Act is a march toward losing, and this Hulk scene is a big win, right? It’s a guy solving his problem and being a funny character because now, he’s eloquent. We had to, at the last second, scrap all that, put aside all these scenes that used to have Smart Hulk and then re-shoot the First Act of Endgame, going to Thanos’ country lodge, that used to have the Smart Hulk.

Markus: We wanted everybody to have this enormous journey in the five year jump [after the Thanos snap], and to really see, in sometimes shocking ways, how the loss had affected them. We hadn’t given Banner [a change] because we had transformed him earlier, and he had nowhere to go. And suddenly by needing to take it out of the first movie, it was the perfect thing.

I would have loved to see that Doctor Strange Mindscape scene. I understand why they didn’t use it, but still! Hopefully, that’s something that the creative team plays with in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s just a cool concept I’d want to see brought to life on the big screen.

Would you have liked to see Hulk and Bruce Banner fight in the Mindscape?