Anthony Russo Revisits Endgame’s Most Iconic Moments

Captain America catching Mjolnir looked inevitable once audiences finally saw it. Anthony Russo remembers just how many years of storytelling it took to make those few seconds work.

The Avengers: Endgame co-director revisits some of the Marvel blockbuster’s defining scenes in a new breakdown, explaining how he and brother Joe Russo approached a film designed as the culmination of everything the MCU had built up to that point.

Steve Rogers finally proving worthy of Thor’s hammer was one of its biggest payoffs. Russo traces the moment back to Avengers: Age of Ultron, where Steve managed to move Mjolnir just enough to start years of fan debate. By Endgame, the filmmakers could finally cash in that setup during Steve’s battle with Thanos.

Russo also discusses Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton’s confrontation on Vormir. Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner had developed their characters’ friendship across multiple films, and he remembers the actors supporting one another while filming a sequence in which both characters are desperately trying to sacrifice themselves for the other.

Then there are the portals.

The Russos originally imagined the enormous “On your left” return of the vanished heroes as a single continuous shot, spending months developing an animated version before ultimately reshaping the sequence to better control its rhythm and emotional reveals.

Seven years after Endgame, those scenes remain among Marvel’s biggest crowd-pleasers — and with the Russos now directing Avengers: Doomsday, their old ending has suddenly become the starting point again.