The Ending for AVENGERS: ENDGAME Was the First Thing the Russo Bros Developed Before Work Started on INFINITY WAR
For those of you who have ever taken a screenwriting class, one of the first things that taught is to know how you’re ending the the story you want to tell before you start writing it. This way you know exactly where you want the story to go as you are writing it.
I know a good amount of screenwriters working in Hollywood who seem to ignore this lesson, but not Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo! These guys have consistently pumped out great stories and scripts for their films, and one of the reasons for this is that they know the endings the their stories.
During a recent interview with Collider, the filmmakers revealed that they already had the ending for Avengers: Endgame before they even started developing the story for Avengers: Infinity War. When talking about their development process, they explained:
“When we were working on both Infinity War and Endgame, the first thing we did was break the ending of Endgame. Because we wanted to know where we were going. It’s very hard to tell a story if you don’t know where you’re going… We spent months in a room just talking about a three-page outline. Literally, page one is act one, page two is act two, page three is act three. Because you have to know in a contained document like that, ‘Here’s where we start, here’s what happens in the middle, here’s where it ends.’ If you know that, it’s a lot easier to get to script. A more malleable format to work in a short outline like that, spend your time talking about it and thinking it through.”
For those of you who are aspiring filmmakers, this is a very valuable lesson, and they have proven time and time again that their storytelling process works.
Now, I just can’t wait to see what exactly what this ending they came up with is going to be! At this point we can only speculate what the ending will be, but according to the Russo’ no one has figured it out yet and Robert Downey Jr. has said that there’s no way that anyone will be able to guess what happens.
Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26th!