'Avengers Endgame': Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explain why Steve Rogers couldn't be killed off in the final movie
'Avengers: Endgame' had countless theories going on about how things pan out for Iron Man and Captain America in the end and many felt it was Steve Rogers who would be a sure shot fatality. That he had officially completed his contract with Marvel after the film was one of the primary reasons. However, Iron Man and Black Widow (Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlet Johansson) were the ones to be sacrificed while Cap went back to live out his life in the past with Peggy Carter.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, 'Endgame' and 'Infinity War' writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, shared the reason behind keeping Cap alive at the end of the fourth Avengers movie. "We realized over the course of the movies that Cap and Tony were on crossing arcs," McFeely said. "Cap, who had started as completely selfless and was jumping on grenades willy-nilly, was becoming more self-interested. Not to say selfish, but if you watch Civil War, particularly, he’s making decisions based on what he wants, even if it breaks up the Avengers."
"And Tony started as the brash billionaire playboy, and the stakes are growing for him, the responsibility’s growing for him. We realized at one point, late in 2015, that for Steve to be his best self, he was going to have to get a life, and for Tony to be his best self, he might have to lose his." McFeely added, echoing that heroic moment from 'Captain America: The First Avenger' (the pair's first Marvel Studios movie), "Sometimes the grenade goes off."
"And that’s why [Captain America] can’t die in this movie,” Markus added “Because he was willing to die in the first one. That’s not a journey."
"If you just keep going until it peters out or you lose interest, it kind of decays backwards, making [people] think less of everything that came before," Markus opined. "To have the opportunity to very deliberately tie all those threads together and have it add up to something and have it end, that’s what stories are about."
"That’s how you judge whether something was great or not. If at the end of 'The Great Gatsby', they got into a car and drove off and then we wondered what was going to happen next? We wouldn’t have remembered that....It needs an end or it loses meaning. The end is what cements the thing, to actually sew it together and bring it to a crescendo, and yeah, take people off the board, finish their arcs. If Tony made it out the other side, and Iron Man 4 was waiting there, you’d be like, [shakes head] One too many..."
'Avengers: Endgame' is available for streaming on Disney Plus.
