Avengers: Endgame Writers Explain Why Hulk/Black Widow Romance Was Ignored

One of the elements that got left in the past for Avengers: Endgame was the relationship between Black Widow and the Hulk. While there was a brief moment that acknowledged the romance between Natasha and Bruce in Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame makes no reference to it and the writers for the film revealed in a new interview why they chose to ignore the former relationship.

Speaking with Empire (per Uproxx), Stephen McFeely said they “thought it would be more elegant not to address” the relationship. “We certainly tried to [include references]. In Infinity War we have scenes … wrote ’em, shot ’em … of them sort of hashing that out. ‘You’ve been gone, I’ve moved on’ — that kind of stuff. It became very clear that if a scene was not on the ‘A plot,’ it could not survive Infinity War. That thing has to be on rails just to get to the finish line. You couldn’t wrap up loose threads just because you wanted to.”

Christopher Markus added that Hulk’s new status quo in Endgame as Professor Hulk meant that “it [would] seem a little odd, in the midst of everyone’s mourning and his change to a 2,000-pound genius, to go, ‘and they’re dating!’”