Avengers: Endgame Writers Say They Wrote Themselves Into a Corner in Civil War

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have been guiding the MCU’s biggest story beats for the last several years, but even they write themselves into corners sometimes. The writing team, who have written all the Captain America films, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, spoke with Uproxx at CinemaCon and recalled times where they’ve left themselves without narrative outs and had to figure out ways to fix it.

Talking about times where they’ve left themselves with no exits, McFeely said, “We did some, yeah, I can’t say anything. But we wrote ourselves into some real serious corners. Yes.”

Markus added that they “came up [exit paths] with afterward. Yes. But, basically, we totally screwed ourselves and then went, ‘Oh come on.'”

Pressed for an example, Markus pointed out some of the emotional moments in Captain America: Civil War, saying, “There’s no going back, but they have the huge fight at the airport, then Tony’s back on his side, then he flips again and you wouldn’t do that all the time. It felt like, those felt like deal breakers, at certain points.”

His writing partner said, “I mean, I’ll say Chris is right. Civil War is a good one, by virtue of killing all of those super soldiers in the third act. So the big switcheroo was a very, very big decision. It’s kind of writing ourselves in a corner because there’s only one way that movie can end now. And it’s personal and smaller. But if we had not done that, you would have had just another punch ’em up with random stunt people.”