Just a few days ago, fans got to enjoy previously unreleased deleted scenes from Avengers: Endgame on Disney+. (Haven’t heard about those yet? We rounded them up HERE!) And now it’s time, naturally, to dive deeper into some of those sequences. The number one question on everyone’s mind probably is, “Why didn’t they make the cut?”
One of those excised scenes involved Tony Stark meeting his teenage daughter Morgan in the Soulworld. Just as Tony’s interactions with the younger version of Morgan tugged at the heartstrings (there’s a reason why “I love you 3000” is now an instantly recognizable and famous line) it seems as if this scene, in which the teen tells her father that everything will be alright without him and reiterates that famed line, would have caused just as many feels.
So, why did it land on the cutting room floor? Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo recently discussed the sequence in an interview with Inverse, including how it was brought together and why it was left out. He explained that he and his brother, co-director Anthony, and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely discussed the story together for several months and explored the different avenues they could take with the action and characters.
As for this particular scene, Russo said that the initial plan was to imitate Thanos’ use of the Soul Stone near the end of Avengers: Infinity War and his subsequent encounter with Gamora. “Since Thanos had that poignant experience with his daughter in Infinity War, we started playing with the idea that there was something interesting and resonant in the symmetry with Tony and his daughter,” he explained.
Russo also commented that for a while they had an idea “that when you use the Soul Stone there is sort of this moment that you have this kind of reckoning with something that may be left unresolved in your soul,” which would certainly explain the impetus for developing a scene with Tony and his teenage daughter.
Despite the plausibility of this idea, a key difference soon became clear between the two scenarios, and Russo confirmed the team decided it best to remove this scene from the movie:
“The reason we ended up moving away from it is, once we shot it, we began to understand as we were actually shooting it, is that the audience didn’t have a relationship with his adult daughter in the film. They had a relationship with his young daughter but not with his adult daughter. It didn’t feel like it was as powerful as we may have thought so we began to move away from it.”
What do you think? Would you have liked to see Tony say farewell to Morgan?