The AVENGERS: ENDGAME Creative Team Looked To LOGAN For Inspiration on How To Bring Tony Stark’s Arc To an End
Avengers: Endgame was filled with incredibly cool, surprising, sad, awesome, and unexpected moments. It brought an end to the story arcs for a few characters, most notably Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.
During a recent interview with Empire, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige opened up a bit about the film and during the conversation he discussed closing out the arcs of these characters and how he and the creative looked to Logan and the death of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine as an example for how to handle the end of Tony Stark.
When asked if the team behind Endgame was concerned about killing off Tony Stark, who was a driving force of the franchise, he said:
"No, the idea for Tony came up first and I think we were dedicated to it 100% and we never questioned it, because this was the whole idea. That was the whole point of the ending. Sometimes we're influenced by the words of others, sometimes we're not, and stay the course."
He went on to explain that there needed to be real weight behind Tony’s death:
"Around the time we started working on this film, there was some sense that deaths don't matter in our movies – Nick Fury gets shot and died in Winter Soldier and comes back in the third act, which was awesome, but is not a death. And people were clamoring for, not death necessarily, but stakes and real emotion. And I remember thinking, 'be careful what you wish for,' as we started getting closer to this. But we never questioned it. All of the angst and all of the effort went into sticking the landing, to making it worthwhile."
He then goes on to explain how Logan factored into Stark’s sacrifice to save the world:
"We saw Logan like the audience did, in a theater having nothing to do with the making of that film and went, 'oh my god, what an amazing ending for Hugh as this character.' And there are only a handful of examples where an actor so associated with a character can go out perfectly. That's what we desperately wanted to give Robert, and that was what our focus was on."
Well, they certainly succeeded in what they were hoping to pull off! Logan was an incredible film, so it makes sense that the Marvel team would find inspiration in it for the end of Stark.
As far as Steve Rogers’ ending goes and the fact that he was allowed to find happiness in his life, Feige said:
"That was an idea that came up probably within a year of developing these films and became an anchor for the entire project. It was such an amazing idea, and such a perfect, unexpected ending. For everybody who was guessing he was going to die, because all the polls online certainly had Steve Rogers at the forefront of getting killed. And the fact that, yes, he was changing, he was going away, but in a very unexpected way, and in a way that allowed us to end our Infinity Saga on two characters dancing and a kiss."
Avengers: Endgame offered a wonderfully satisfying conclusion to The Infinity Saga, and like all of you, I can’t wait to see where things go from here!