While promoting the release of Avengers: Endgame on DVD and Blu-ray, the film’s directors Anthony and Joe Russo participated in a Reddit AMA and answered a lot of fan questions.
One of the topics that came up was the reasoning behind why Black Panther was the first dusted hero to return to the fight at the end of the movie and there was a specific reason behind that order.
Joe Russo explained, “We spent a lot of time in the edit room playing around with the sequencing of the portals. We probably didn’t lock that section of the movie until about a month before the film was in theaters.
“We always wanted [Sam Wilson] to be the first one to communicate with [Captain America] via his comm and Sam was last in Wakanda, so logically the first portal that would open would the Wakandan portal.
“And the first person that would logically walk through a portal from Wakanda would be the king himself, bringing his army once again to the defense of Cap and the world.”
So, T’Challa’s entrance was really just due to the fact he was near Sam, plus a whole lot of other heroes were dusted in Wakanda so it made sense that they were the first to appear through the portals.
In the scene, Cap is facing Thanos alone and is getting beaten down, but he then gets the communication from Wilson repeating his iconic line, “On your left,” and the rest is (heartbreaking) history.
The directors also revealed why the cut the scene with all of the Avengers taking a knee following Tony Stark’s death.
“We found the Avengers kneeling scene incredibly emotional as well, but when played in the run of the film, it felt incredibly similar to the moment when all of the heroes stood on the shore at Tony’s funeral, paying their respects to him outside his home,” they wrote.
“The two scenes, when in the film together, seemed to fight one another, and created a repetitious ending.”
They also explained to fans that Captain America was always worthy of picking up Mjolnir and made a conscious decision in Avengers: Age of Ultron to not lift it.
“He always could. Our interpretation of the famous scene in Ultron was that when he realized he could pick up Mjolnir he quickly chose not to, because he didn’t want to embarrass Thor.”
This will likely come as little surprise, but the directors also told fans that the hardest scene to shoot was Tony’s death, which was shot on the last day of production.