As Disney prepares to launch Avengers: Doomsday in December, screenwriter Stephen McFeely has pulled back the curtain on one of the most emotionally devastating moments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. During a Q&A session following a screening of the newly recut Avengers Endgame: Encore, McFeely disclosed that Hawkeye was nearly the hero to give his life at Vormir, rather than Black Widow, in the film’s pivotal Soul Stone sacrifice scene. The revelation, delivered to an audience gathered to experience the re-release, sheds new light on the creative deliberations that shaped one of the franchise’s most heartbreaking deaths.
The Soul Stone sequence in Endgame remains one of the most harrowing set pieces in modern blockbuster cinema. As the surviving heroes race to gather the Infinity Stones and reverse Thanos’ devastating “snap,” Black Widow and Hawkeye are forced to undergo a ritual sacrifice in order to obtain the gem. In the finished film, it is Natasha Romanov who ultimately leaps to her death, a choice that has haunted fans ever since. According to McFeely, however, that outcome was never guaranteed.
A Difficult Decision at Vormir
McFeely, who co-wrote Endgame with Christopher Markus, explained that the writers approached the scene with genuine trepidation. The Soul Stone demanded a trade of lives for lives, and the pair needed two characters whose bond would make the loss resonate. “There was a sense of dread over the decision,” McFeely recalled. “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. 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] 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. But also, in the big picture, she’s got red in her ledger, and she’s been trying to make up for that her entire life. That’s why when she found the Avengers, they were a new family for her. So, this idea that she could save her family, in the greater sense of that, was really important.”
Stephen McFeely, Avengers: Endgame screenwriter
Yet the choice to kill off one of the MCU’s few prominent female heroes carried weight beyond mere narrative logic. McFeely admitted that the writing team experimented with an alternate version in which Hawkeye perished, and that the reaction from within Marvel proved decisive. “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.'”
Even with the final decision in place, McFeely confessed that he harbors a lingering regret about the scene’s execution. Because the sacrifice lands at the end of act two, the film had little room to properly process the emotional fallout before hurtling toward its climactic battle. “The sacrifice is at the end of act two, which meant there was a lot of movie left,” he said. “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.”
What’s New in the Encore Re-release
McFeely’s comments surfaced during the theatrical return of Avengers Endgame: Encore, which premiered on Sept. 25, 2026. Far more than a simple re-release, this version incorporates roughly two minutes of new footage filmed alongside Avengers: Doomsday, designed to bridge the two films more seamlessly. For those who don’t mind spoilers about what was added, the additions fall into three major beats: an extended ending in which Steve Rogers and Agent Carter are visited by a 2012 variant of Loki, a move that may explain how Captain America appears in the upcoming sequel; a sequence in which Doctor Doom abducts Bruce Banner from a military complex; and a scene in which the Time Variance Authority detects “incursions” between universes, hinting that the multiverse is on the verge of collapse.
These enhancements transform Encore into a prologue of sorts, quietly stitching the events of Endgame into the broader, increasingly tangled mythology that Doomsday will build upon. The introduction of a Loki variant and the looming threat of multiversal collapse suggest that the writers intend to reward attentive viewers with connective tissue that pays off in the next chapter.
Looking Ahead
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