Johansson: Vormir scene in Avengers: Endgame originally looked different

Black Widow and Hawkeye’s mission to get the Soul Stone in Avengers: Endgame once included an army of creatures, says Scarlet Johansson.

Avengers: Endgame was released to plenty of fanfare last year and the swansong of the original Avengers team saw the deaths of some of our favourite heroes. While one sacrifice was epic, the other was personal.

The latter could easily have looked very different, however, as Scarlett Johansson revealed to EW during the promotion tour of Black Widow, her first solo venture in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Johansson detailed how the directors of the film, Joe and Anthony Russo, kept envisioning different ways for Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff and Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton/Hawkeye to retrieve the Soul Stone on Vormir. One iteration that they shot included an ‘army of Dementor-type creatures’ (from the Harry Potter franchise) chasing the two characters. Johansson stated that she was thinking parents “will never forgive us for how these creatures look.”

The directors eventually chose to go down a different route as the scene felt ‘too busy’. The final version that viewers got was much more intimate, which was exactly the effect the creators and actors aimed for.

In Avengers: Endgame, to get the stone, Red Skull tells Nat and Clint that a trade must be made in exchange for the stone – ‘a soul for a soul’. Realizing this meant that one of them would have to die, the two friends argued over who should sacrifice themselves so the other could live and complete the mission. Nat and Clint fought each other before Nat made the decision for the two of them and plummeted to her death, leaving viewers speechless.

"“We wanted to leave [the audience] with the weight of that loss and the shock of it.”"

Black Widow’s death was undoubtedly emotional, but the scene was also one of the more controversial aspects of the film. Nat died in the same way that Gamora was killed in Avengers: Infinity War, meaning the sole female member of the original Avengers team was effectively fridged for Clint’s character growth. The situation was made worse when Nat’s sacrifice wasn’t even acknowledged in the film – Tony Stark was given a huge funeral while Nat was all but forgotten.

The only nod to her existence came from Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) who reassured Clint that Nat and Tony both knew that they had succeeded in bringing the Fallen back. But it could have been even worse if Nat had spent her final moments losing a battle against Dementors. And, we can all agree that yet another scene of a nameless CGI army would have been detrimental to the film.

With Black Widow’s future ending in Avengers: Endgame, it’s time for us to discover her past in Black Widow, set to release in May 2020.