WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, in theaters now.
As many fan theories predicted, time travel figures prominently in Avengers: Endgame, with the surviving heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe traveling back to the events of previous MCU films to recover the six Infinity Stones.
One of the larger set pieces has Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk and Ant-Man revisiting the Battle of New York from 2012's The Avengers to recover the Space, Mind and Time Stones while all three are located in Manhattan, with Cap eventually fighting the past version of himself for the Mind Stone. However, according to screenwriters Christopher McFeely and Stephen Markus, the sequence was nearly omitted entirely for a larger scene on Asgard during 2013's Thor: The Dark World that would've pit two very different MCU heroes against each other.
"In the first draft, we didn’t go back to the [original 2012] Avengers movie. We went back to Asgard," McFeely explained in an interview with the New York Times. "There’s a moment in the MCU, if you’re paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault. In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him."
In the final cut, only Thor and Rocket travel to the events of the 2013 film, while Heimdall doesn't appear in Endgame at all. Ultimately, with three Infinity Stones in New York at the same time during the climactic 2012 battle, the time-traveling locations were streamlined with the final story decision.
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Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, Avengers: Endgame stars Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, Don Cheadle as War Machine, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Danai Gurira as Okoye and Bradley Cooper as Rocket, with Gwyneth Paltrow Pepper Potts, Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, Benedict Wong as Wong, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie and Josh Brolin as Thanos.