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People just discovered Avengers: Endgame’s most devastating deleted scene

Black Widow had a different death

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Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) looks fearfully over her shoulder just before sacrificing herself on Vormir, in an unused, deleted scene from Avengers: Endgame. Image: Marvel Studios
Susana Polo is an entertainment editor at Polygon, specializing in pop culture and genre fare, with a primary expertise in comic books. Previously, she founded The Mary Sue.

A handful of deleted scenes for Avengers: Endgame hit Disney Plus last November, but quarantine streaming is frightfully real, and some fans are only seeing alternate takes from the blockbuster’s biggest moments for the first time. Case in point: Black Widow’s last stand on Vormir.

In the final cut of Endgame, Natasha Romanoff sacrifices her life to give Hawkeye the chance to get the soul stone, an important part of the whole Time Heist plan. But in a deleted scene that caught fire on Twitter this week, she isn’t just fighting Hawkeye for the right to sacrifice herself. She’s racing to do it before Thanos kills both of them.

In the final film, Thanos never appeared on Vormir in this time period. Instead, he spent his time unravelling the alternate-timeline memories that past Nebula picked up from the presence of present Nebula, which he used to follow the Avengers back to the present and confront them.

An alternate demise for Black Widow is only one of the reworked/cut sequences in the special features of Avengers: Endgame’s digital release. Folks with a copy of the DVD/Bluray or a Disney Plus subscription can check out an extra scene between Hulk and the Ancient One, between Tony and Pepper, between War Machine and Captain America, between Thor and Rocket in Asgard, between Tony and his dad in the past, a scene where Rocket makes fun of the Avengers for having trouble defeating the Chitauri in New York, a scene where all the Avengers awkwardly kneel after Tony dies, an extra scene from the final battle with Thanos’ forces, and a scene where Tony says goodbye to his teenage daughter (played by 13 Reasons Why’s Katherine Langford) in that weird orange space.

Avengers: Endgame ran three hours long. There’s even more that didn’t make the cut.


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