Kevin Feige Discusses the Severed Head of Captain America Scene That Never Was

In a recent live Q&A with Empire, MCU President Kevin Feige was asked about a scrapped scene that was mentioned by Avengers: Endgame directors, Joe and Anthony Russo at their Hall H San Diego Comic-Con panel I attended. The scene was casually mentioned as something that didn’t make the cut, but the idea was that Thanos would actually decapitate Captain America, and actually toss Steve Rogers his own head. This is a confusing visual. It turns out this would have taken place during the time-travel portion of the film. Here’s what Feige had to say about it:

"I think there are behind the scenes pictures of this, us having the giant omnibus of the Infinity Gauntlet comic collection and saying, we need to do justice to this,'" he explained. "One of those images was Thanos sitting on a throne of skulls, ruling over everything and we wanted to get that in there. One of the ideas was, when they finish the time heist, they returned to a world [in 2023] that Thanos had already conquered, that involved all of that, the throne made of bones and skulls and had him tossing, like a bowling ball, Captain America's severed skull head, still in the cowl, to Captain America. And it was pretty cool, but the logic to get there defeated us."

That makes better sense! But is pretty dismal. I’m not too mad about the absence of the scene. When asked how far into development this scene got, Feige further explained:

"I think it ended up in a set of pages at one point in the script. There might be a piece of concept art somewhere with it.”

And while this scene never did get made, the whole idea of it was there to exemplify the fact that Thanos was a serious psychopath. I think they ended up doing a great job at that after all. Feige continued to talk about the process of developing the character by saying:

“Thanos is not just a purple guy with a big chin who sits in chairs and smirks, which is basically all he had been up until Infinity War. So much of the time we spent in a conference room in Pinewood in Atlanta that someday I want to have a plaque: 'It was here that nine people almost lost their minds developing and writing Infinity War and Endgame.' I would keep opening the book and saying, 'but we need to do this. We need something like this. Thanos can do this.' Some of that led to things you saw in Infinity War in Nowhere where he turns Drax into a pile of cubes. Or turns Nebula into that spiraling ribbon. Or has bubbles come out of Star-Lord's gun. His casual, sadistic use of the stones was something that we kept wanting to do."

Do you wish you could have seen this insane scene play out?