Avengers: Endgame writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus were given a seemingly impossible task of wrapping up ten years of the MCU (thus far) as well as the storylines of the six original Avengers.
While they received mostly high praise for what they were able to create, the film was slammed for the way it killed off Scarlett Johansson’s character Black Widow, who sacrificed herself on Vormir to save Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and the rest of the universe.
Fans believed she had been ‘fridged’ – a term for the comic book trope where a woman dies to further the hero’s motivations and story – because she didn’t have children or a partner and was, therefore ‘less worthy’ than Hawkeye.
One of the biggest gripes fans had with the film was that after Black Widow died, she didn’t receive any kind of grand goodbye similar to Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man or Chris Evans’ Captain America.
And it turns out McFeely has his own gripes with it too.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, McFeely said he had one huge regret about Black Widow’s death, “She jumps on the grenade. I’m really proud of that moment. I don’t have any regrets.
“The only regret is that it comes at the end of Act Two. So you can’t really roll around in the grief because we’ve got another hour of movie and we haven’t solved the A-plot problem. So that’s the downside.”
Black Widow’s death occurs halfway through the three-hour film and the writers couldn’t find a place to give fans a chance to grieve over the character and by the time the end of the film rolled around only Iron Man and Cap were given a farewell that perfectly closed their story arcs (which were also told through their own trilogies…).
McFeely said that they looked into having Hawkeye make the sacrifice, but the women on the crew asked them not to “rob her of this”. If he had died she would have felt like she failed him and herself.
While we’re happy we’re finally getting a standalone Black Widow movie next year, it would have been great to see more of her character earlier on as she is one of the founding members of the Avengers and we know so little about her background.
Johansson has revealed that filming Black Widow gave her the closure that Endgame couldn’t give her.
The actress appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and spoke about the film, saying, “I’m so excited about it. I can’t wait to share it with everybody. It was fantastic. I mean, I’m partial, but I’m pretty excited.”
“It was honestly, it brought a closure to me that I needed. Because I was kind of wiped out of that last one [Endgame]. I mean, emotionally and literally.”
She explained that she’d come to terms with her character’s end, “There’s very few certain things, but death’s pretty certain. But people definitely don’t believe it and have tried to convince me that my character did not actually die, that it exists in a different universe, but I did die.”
Black Widow will be set earlier in the MCU – after Captain America: Civil War (2016) and before Infinity War (2018).
Black Widow is set for release in May 2020.