A lot goes into making a movie — especially one in the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe — and sometimes directors don’t get things quite right on the first go-around. Such is the case for Avengers: Endgame and filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo, who brought back Tilda Swinton to reshoot her scene more than a year after she wrapped on it.
That’s right: We haven’t exhausted every possible Endgame topic! A movie of this magnitude is chock full of behind-the-scenes secrets. Spoilers ahead!
Swinton, who plays the Ancient One, appears during a pivotal moment in the middle of Endgame. When Professor Hulk and company travel back in time to 2012 New York City to retrieve three Infinity Stones as part of their time heist mission, the green guy pays the Ancient One a visit at the Sanctum Sanctorum and asks her to surrender the Time Stone. While Ant-Man, Captain America, and Iron Man are off retrieving the Space and Mind Stones, Professor Hulk is on the receiving end of a lecture about how one can’t just take an Infinity Stone out of its proper place without severely damaging the existing timeline.
It’s an important scene that establishes how time travel works in the MCU – but it’s a scene that originally played out differently.
Chatting with IndieWire, Swinton revealed that the Russo Brothers called her into film the sequence all over again a year after she first shot it. Swinton explained,
As is expected, Swinton couldn’t dish up exact details on what the original take entailed, though she did state that the reworked plot points were “all about” the visual timeline the Ancient One crafts when explaining to Professor Hulk the rules of time travel and alternate realities. She then noted that the alterations centered around, quote, “the information that the Ancient One holds about the nature of the [Infinity] Stones, that they have to be put back.”
In the theatrical cut of the film, the Ancient One goes into great detail about how the timeline is impacted when someone takes an Infinity Stone from one point in time and transports it to another. That kind of interdimensional tomfoolery creates a branch timeline that is dark, chaotic, and doesn’t abide by the same laws that the original timeline does. This explanation informs the Avengers’ decision to have one team member — Captain America — return the Stones after they defeat Thanos at the end of the film.
Swinton also said that the Russo Brothers changed up the dialogue in her scene to better connect to Endgame shooting down time travel rules presented in movies like Back to the Future and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Keep watching the video to find out the real reason Tilda Swinton reshot Endgame a year later!
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