Avengers: Endgame Writer Tried a Version Where Hawkeye Made the Soul Stone Sacrifice, but Female Colleagues Convinced Him Who It Needed Be

A version of Avengers: Endgame featured another hero making the Soul Stone sacrifice, until writer Stephen McFeely was convinced against this by female Marvel colleagues.

Warning! Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame follow...

Endgame features the sad death of founding Avenger Natasha Romanov, AKA Black Widow, who makes the ultimate sacrifice to ensure Hawkeye obtains the Soul Stone. But the movie's co-writer has admitted hesitating over killing Scarlett Johansson's character, with Hawkeye briefly in the frame to die instead.

During a post-Avengers: Endgame Encore screening Q&A in Minnesota this past weekend (thanks, Forbes ), Avengers scribe Stephen McFeely said he had tried writing a draft of this sequence where Hawkeye perished — only for this version to be met with resistance from multiple women on the Marvel team.

"There was a sense of dread over the decision," McFeely began, discussing the early realization that Endgame's return to Vormir would mean a big death was necessary. "In the design, we needed to make sure that two people who loved each other went, and [Black Widow and Hawkeye] were the obvious pairing," he continued. "So, even though it's a platonic relationship, they've been together as a duo in the Avengers the whole time.”

"In our mind, it was always going to be [Black Widow who died] because she was, I would argue, the greater hero in some ways, but selfishly — just as part of what my job is — I want to make you feel the worst you can feel."

Narratively, Black Widow's death makes more sense to complete her character arc and remove the "red in her ledger." And while Hawkeye had spent the past few years post-Snap as a brutal assassin, he does have a wife and kids to go home to if Thanos' decision is undone. Meanwhile, in sacrificing herself, Black Widow is protecting her own found family.

"When she found the Avengers, they were a new family for her," McFeely continued. "So, this idea that she could save her family, in the greater sense of that, was really important."

Still, there was some hesitation of killing off Black Widow, as one of the few prominent female Avengers. Perhaps surprisingly, however, McFeely's colleagues encouraged the decision.

"Because it's not a small thing to kill off a principal female character in the MCU, we tried a version of Hawkeye [dying] and a number of the female employees at Marvel, when they read [the script], grabbed me in the hallway and said, 'Don't you do this to her. Don't you take her heroic moment and give it to him. And I said, 'Oh, that's a really good point.'"

While many fans believe her death to be a strong end for her decade-long character arc, some have argued that Endgame should have spent longer mourning her. (This is a view I personally agree with, especially as we spend time at Tony's funeral later on.) Responding to this fan complaint, McFeely argued that he had tried to reference her as much as possible later in the film, though there was simply a lot still left to get done.

"The sacrifice is at the end of act two, which meant there was a lot of movie left," McFeely concluded. "There was not that much time to mourn Natasha because we got to snap everybody back and Thanos has to bomb us, and the Avengers have to fight their biggest fight in the MCU and Captain America has to wield Thor's hammer... we had a lot to do. We were mentioning her all over the ending of the movie, where Hulk says, 'I tried to bring her back,' and Hawkeye is lamenting her loss with the Scarlet Witch. It was about the best we could have done, given there was another character that was going to sacrifice himself."

Avengers: Endgame is back in theaters now via its Encore re-release which has up to four extra scenes tacked onto the end, preparing you for Avengers: Doomsday .

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social