Earlier this week, it was revealed that Tony Stark almost faced a much worse fate than what we eventually saw in Avengers: Endgame. One of the initial concepts had Iron Man getting too close to the Infinity Stones when he makes that climactic snap at the end of this epic superhero saga. And the force was so powerful, it blew one of his eyes right out of its socket. That was just too much for Marvel boss Kevin Feige to handle. So we got the death scene that we saw in the finished movie. Now, with the help of some very R-rated fan art, we get a taste of what that eye-popping alternate death scene for Tony Stark may have looked like.
So apparently this scene when Iron Man dies in #endgame his Eyeball was meant to pop out, but they didn’t go that direction XD @Russo_Brothers@RobertDowneyJrpic.twitter.com/2dibBLA5yC
— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) January 10, 2020
Marvel After hours director’s cut…. Yeah I would have been (OH SHIT!) it they went this direction 😭😂 (more accurate take) @Russo_Brothers@robertdowneyjrpic.twitter.com/4Ce9xyVZaC
— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) January 10, 2020
Fan artist extraordinaire BossLogic has rendered the gruesome scene as it was initially conceived in the pre-production stage for Avengers 4. You can see Tony Stark with his eyeball dangling out of its socket, and it’s quite shocking, to say the least. Weta digital VFX supervisor Matt Aitken had this to say about what could have been, if the MCU was into making R-Rated gore-fests.
“We gave the filmmakers a full range [of looks] to choose from and one of those was where the energy from the stones had acted right up into his face and popped one of his eyeballs out and it was hanging out on his cheek. They didn’t go for that one.”
The VFX team behind Avengers 4 needed to strike the right balance between scary and family friendly. They couldn’t go too far over the top in their PG-13 rated movie, and they certainly didn’t want to scare some poor children for life. Though, it needed to be believable that the force from the snap was enough to kill Tony Stark. Marvel VFX producer Jen Underdahl went onto say this about the scene in question.
“With any development item, you want to be able to give the filmmakers a full gamut, from sort of a light touch all the way to horror, and this will never be in it. But by doing that exercise and by letting them see sort of every stage, they can kind of pinpoint and circle the drain on where they think the look is going to settle. We did go several rounds on that guy from grisly to not so grisly to more light of a touch, back to OK this is the spot where we think the audience is not going to get too freaked out, but also really understand that Tony has reached the point of no return.”
Helping to lay the foundation for Iron Man’s ultimate sacrifice came with showing both the damage the Infinity Gauntlet did to Hulk and Thanos. Both characters are obviously much more powerful than the mere mortal Tony Stark. So of course it would kill him. Underdahl went onto say this.
“We had seeded in the film this notion of Thanos having damage. There are consequences to him snapping and pursuing this ideology. You see the damage in his face and what that did to him, and he’s built for this,” said Underdahl. Then [you] see the consequences to Smart Hulk, who was made of gamma radiation and the damage that it did there. You knew somewhere in the math that Tony himself, even though he’s got this suit and it’s going to fight for him, ultimately what’s going to result would be something he couldn’t recover from.”
Ultimately, Tony Stark’s death landed in the middle of two extremes, and the VFX team was able to bring some dark grit and weight to this finale for Iron Man and his legacy. Underdahl went onto compare Tony’s eye-pooping scene to what happened with Two-Face in The Dark Knight, “We did do a Two-Face version where you got inside and you saw the sinews and you saw them in the teeth and that. It takes you away from this really powerful moment. You don’t want to be focusing on that or grossed out.”&
Avengers: Endgame is on the shortlist for an Oscars nomination this Monday morning. Will it make the cut? However it all shakes out, now, thanks to BossLogic’s Official Twitter and Insider, we know what Avengers: Endgame would have looked like as an R-Rated movie. And it’s pretty sick.
