Secrets of the epic final battle of 'Avengers: Endgame,' from the female Avengers assembling to Thanos's last stand.

The Avengers assemble for the finale battle
against Thanos in 'Avengers: Endgame' (Photo: Marvel)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Avengers: Endgame.

Avengers: Endgame represents the culmination of the three phases and 21 films comprising the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Endgame’s final set-piece features almost every super-citizen currently residing in the MCU rallying to Captain America’s side to take on Thanos. It’s a massive sequence that was an even more massive undertaking to bring to life, not only for the cast and filmmakers, but also for the army of visual effects artists from multiple VFX houses that made such Marvel-ous sights as Spider-Man riding on Valkyrie’s winged horse and Iron Man wielding the Infinity Stones possible. Yahoo Entertainment spoke with two of the F/X wizards who had a direct hand in the sequence — Matt Aitken, visual effects supervisor for Weta Digital, and Kevin Martel, animation supervisor for ILM — to learn some of the secrets behind the biggest, baddest battle in Marvel history.

The future is female.

It may have taken a decade for Marvel Studios to make a female-fronted feature, but Captain Marvel very quickly made up for lost time, earning more than $400 million at the U.S. box office alone. And Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) flexes her muscle against Thanos as well, taking him on solo as well as alongside Marvel’s other mighty women in one of Endgame’s buzziest moments, which brings together every major MCU female hero with one notable exception. (More on her in a moment.) Aitken and his team at Weta took point on providing the pre-visualization for this crucial scene, which has inspired both praise and criticism from all corners of the Internet. “It's a key moment in the battle, and a genuine part of the storytelling,” he says. “And it was there right from the start in all of the versions of the script that I saw.”

At the same time, Aitken reveals that those early versions of the script didn’t necessarily specify what the women would be doing in that scene. In fact, directors Joe and Anthony Russo were still toying with various ideas as late as September 2018, when they reassembled the cast for a block of additional photography. It was during that shoot that all of the actresses featured in the scene — including Larson, Evangeline Lily (Wasp), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts/Rescue), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Pom Klementieff (Mantis) and Letitia Wright (Shuri) — assembled on set to film their heroic tableau. (For the record, that’s likely the same day that Robert Downey Jr. hosted his “Women of Marvel” lunch, which he later shared widely-circulated pictures of on Instagram.)

By Ethan Alter. 

Full story at Yahoo News.