'Avengers: Endgame' Shot Fake Endings, Real Ending Was Planned Before Developing 'Infinity War'

Marvel Studios rivals Star Wars and Game of Thrones when it comes to preserving the twists and turns of its stories for the public, and last year we even heard stories about how Avengers: Infinity War directors Anthony and Joe Russo went as far as to hand out fake scripts to their actors. Now Mark Ruffalo has revealed that they did the same thing with Avengers: Endgame, shooting as many as five different endings to the upcoming sequel to throw people off. Plus, the Russos explained that Endgame's real ending was decided upon before they even started developing Infinity War.

In an interview with E! News (via Heroic Hollywood), Hulk/Bruce Banner actor Mark Ruffalo gave away one of the Avengers Endgame fake endings, and it involves an unexpected marriage:

"I shot, like, five different endings to this movie. I didn't even get a whole script of this movie. I don't know why. The script I did get had dummy scenes in it. He [pointing to Chris Evans] gets married in this!"

While Ruffalo has "accidentally" leaked plot points before, we're assuming he wouldn't slip up this drastically, so it seems unlikely that we're going to see Chris Evans' Steve Rogers get married in Endgame. On the other hand, I suppose a marriage between Cap and Emily VanCamp's Sharon Carter wouldn't be totally out of the question. They'd probably just need to use the film's time jumps as a way to provide a sturdier foundation for that relationship. Regardless, I'm betting the franchise's shippers out there are already working on tons of Cap/Bucky wedding fan art.

Again, this level of secrecy isn't a new approach for the Russos: one of the fake scenes they and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely slid into Infinity War involved Gamora throwing Thanos off the cliff instead of the other way around. Looks like they're doing "whatever it takes" to preserve the film's actual ending.

Speaking of which, the Russos sat down with Collider and explained that the movie's real ending was decided on long before production began:

"When we were working on both Infinity War and Endgame, the first thing we did was break the ending of Endgame. Because we wanted to know where we were going. It's very hard to tell a story if you don't know where you're going. So we have a very specific process with [the writers] where we spent months in a room just talking about a three-page outline. Literally, page one is act one, page two is act two, page three is act three. Because you have to know in a contained document like that, 'Here's where we start, here's what happens in the middle, here's where it ends.' If you know that, it's a lot easier to get to script. A more malleable format to work in a short outline like that, spend your time talking about it and thinking it through. We knew fairly early on how this was gonna end."

Avengers: Endgame blasts into theaters on April 26, 2019.