Hi, I'm Eric Boss. An Avengers Endgame, now officially the most profitable film of all time,

nearly ended with one of the darkest, most f***ed-up twists that would have triggered screams of terror

from millions of children and millions of grown men who like toys too much. At Comic-Conn't

2019, before Marvel Studios broke the internet by having Natalie Portman hold up a hammer,

Rehershiela Ali put on a hat, and saying more or less nothing about the Fantastic Four Black Panther or Spider-Man.

Before all this, the writers of Avengers End Game, Christopher Marcus and Stephen McPhealy, spoke at a fascinating panel that revealed a number of deleted scenes, alternate versions of the script, and concepts that were rejected.

The most interesting of them was an alternate final act, the Battle of Earth, as they're calling it,

in which 2014 Thanos arrived to the present day, thanks to evil nebula, swapping in and blasting

them up through the quantum tunnel, and then shit gets real dark.

Now, the screenwriters go into more detail about this in the commentary track for the Avengers

Endgame Blu-ray release, but here's what we learned about this darker alternate ending at

the Comic-Con panel.

So the moderator asked, you said the wildest thing was Thanos literally walking out and

throwing down the head of a decapitated Captain America from 2012.

And then shortly after this, the writers responded, Thanos knowing it would take Nebula some time to rejigger the time machine to bring

him back, so he went down to the present day Earth, which would have been 2014, and wiped

it out and killed the Avengers.

And then Nebula would turn on the time machine, and then he would walk through with the

adventure he had killed, saying, I killed you again, what are you going to do about it?

Yikes! The severed

head of Steve Rogers, people. Thanos was about to go full Game of Thrones, but I guess with

an ending with actual catharsis. And the saddest thing is, poor Captain America would have just

...