Avengers: Endgame‘s time travel antics allowed the movie to get all nostalgic and revisit past entries in the MCU. Perhaps the most obvious choice of events to journey back to was The Avengers, bringing the franchise full circle, while the most surprising was the trip to Thor: The Dark World, easily one of the least-favorite of Marvel’s films.
It turns out, though, that going back to the Battle of New York wasn’t originally the plan and there was even more time spent on Asgard in 2013. Empire chatted to the filmmakers of Endgame and one of the revelations they made was that Iron Man originally went to Thor’s homeworld, too, in order to claim the Tesseract when it was sitting in Odin’s vaults.
Here’s what co-writer Stephen McFeely revealed:
“Technically in Thor: The Dark World, the Tesseract is in the vault as the Aether is also there. So that sent Tony to Asgard, and he had an invisible stealth suit, and he fought Heimdall, who could of course see him. I think Joe [Russo] went in and said, ‘Why don’t we go in to Avengers? It’s the biggest movie, it’s the most fun, let’s go.'”
We’ve heard about this aborted Iron Man vs. Heimdall fight before and, while it sounds epic, the right decision was undoubtedly made in switching Tony’s mission to the aftermath of The Avengers. That excursion resulted in many of Endgame‘s best moments – Loki’s escape, Hulk hating stairs, the double Cap fight. Imagine a version of the movie that didn’t give us the “America’s ass” meme. What a truly terrible timeline that would be, eh?
Of course, if Tony did go to Asgard as well, you wouldn’t have the plot hole of why Iron Man and Ant-Man choose such a difficult moment to nab the Space Stone from. From their point of view, it would’ve made a lot more sense to pinch it when it was gathering dust in Odin’s basement rather than having to swipe it from under their path selves’ noses. But hey, it was more fun for us that way, right?