Avengers: Endgame Writers Explain Why Tony Stark Had To Die
By Who lives? Who dies? That is the power of a screenwriter. Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have been pulling back the veil in the wake of the MCU movie’s record-breaking release. Now that the movie is on Disney+ — including a new scene — fans are watching it again and studying every detail.
Most fans knew going into Avengers 4 that actors Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans were planning to end their Marvel contracts with Endgame. But it wasn’t clear how their stories would end, or even if they would end.
Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were asked why it was important that the story had a definitive end — that Tony Stark died vs Steve Rogers getting to go have a full life with Peggy Carter?
Here’s how Christopher Markus answered Vanity Fair’s question:
Because it legitimizes the whole thing. If you just keep going until it peters out or you lose interest, it kind of decays backwards, making [people] think less of everything that came before. To have the opportunity to very deliberately tie all those threads together and have it add up to something and have it end, that’s what stories are about. That’s how you judge whether something was great or not. If at the end of The Great Gatsby, they got into a car and drove off and then we wondered what was going to happen next? We wouldn’t have remembered that.