This may surprise you, but MAJOR SPOILERS for AVENGERS: ENDGAME. Consider yourself warned. As the epic finale of The Infinity Saga, AVENGERS: ENDGAME brought together just about all the major players of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they fought to save the entire galaxy from Thanos (Josh Brolin).
Now, let's get into the nitty gritty. As we all know, AVENGERS: ENDGAME didn't give everyone a happy ending as several heroes sacrificed themselves for the good of the universe. The biggest death of AVENGERS: ENDGAME was Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), which to be fair, was largely expected by audiences, but that didn't make the moment any less impactful. While speaking with Empire, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said that there was never a moment when killing off Tony Stark wasn't in the cards.
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.
Death is rarely something which sticks in the world of comic-books, and the MCU has certainly seen the return of several characters who were once thought to be dead, but Kevin Feige wanted to be sure that Tony Stark's death had real weight. "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," Feige explained. "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." The MCU team looked to LOGAN, which served as Hugh Jackman's final film as Wolverine, for inspiration on how to properly land the blow of Tony Stark's death.
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.
AVENGERS: ENDGAME is now available on Digital and will be hitting DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD on August 13th.