SPOILERS AHEAD FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME!
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There were a lot of interesting character arcs in Avengers: Endgame but arguably the most eyecatching – and certainly the funniest – was Thor’s storyline.
To quickly sum it up, the God of Thunder starts off mega-pissed that he didn’t kill Thanos when he had a chance in Infinity War and after realising they can’t undo the snappening, he descends into a pit of guilt and depression in which he goes from buff superhero to something resembling the Dude from The Big Lebowski, complete with beard and beer gut. While the gut ends up staying, Thor eventually finds his resolve again after a heart-to-heart with his late mother, Frigga, thanks to Endgame‘s time travel manipulations.
It’s a very dramatic and comedic arc that many didn’t expect, yet it worked exceedingly well for the character and Chris Hemsworth sold the hell out of fat Thor. However there was a point where the God of Thunder nearly had a completely different storyline in Endgame that would’ve been far less emotionally impactful and far less funny.
Key word – almost.
Chatting to Fandango, Endgame co-screenwriter Stephen McFeely revealed that before they settled on the final idea of Thor going back in time to 2013 to Asgard with Rocket Raccoon in order to steal the Reality Stone, they were originally going to pair him up with Tony Stark.
The reasoning behind this is because they liked the whole magic vs science idea with Tony in Asgard, the potential fun they could’ve had with Iron Man taking on Thor’s BFF, Idris Elba‘s Heimdall, and the fact that the Reality Stone and Space Stone were both in Asgard at the same time.
This was ultimately scrapped as the 2012 setting during the first Avengers movie was a better backdrop for the Space Stone and we ended up with Rocket and Thor, which is the far funnier duo than Tony and Thor TBH.
“Our first draft was a version where Tony and Thor go to Asgard, because I like the idea of Tony going, like, in theory going to Asgard and seeing science versus magic, and stuff like that. And then he fought Heimdall, who could of course see him even though Tony had an invisible stealth suit on or something.”
Close enough.
There were also a bunch of other complications with the original idea for Thor’s Endgame storyline. Co-writer Christopher Markus said that they originally had Endgame fat Thor come fact-to-face with ripped Dark World Thor but that would’ve been way too confusing as it meant introducing three different versions of the God of Thunder in the same movie.
While we saw Jane Foster for a brief moment before Rocket knocked her out (we assume since we actually don’t see what happens), there were initially more extended scenes featuring Thor’s former girlfriend but these were ultimately cut in favour of having more heartfelt moments between Thor and his mother before she dies.
“There were longer ones, but they … you know you wound up before Thor and his mother was so rich and so on point in terms of what he needed to learn that in already a three-hour movie we couldn’t really have a long scene between, say, Rocket and Jane, because, again, it’s drifting off of the character stories that we wanted to tell.”
It was the right decision in the end as while having fat Thor meet up with Jane would be pretty funny, it would’ve lacked the emotional heft we got from Thor getting reassurance from his mother.
We got the closure we missed out on 6 years ago.
So while it certainly would’ve been interesting to have fat Thor and Tony trade banter on Asgard while coming face-to-face with Dark World Thor and Heimdall, the final product of fat Thor and Rocket coming face-to-face with Frigga ultimately worked out far better.
As for where this all leaves Thor now that he’s given the Asgard crown to Valkyrie and joined up with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame, well no one really knows as both McFeely and Markus kept their lips sealed.
Guess we’ll just have to wait until Guardians of the Galaxy 3 to find out.