Thanos' Snap was original going to happen at the start of Endgame

As far as popular movies go, the biggest moment of 2018 was definitely the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when the Mad Titan Thanos collected all of the Infinity Stones and killed half the life in the universe with a snap of his fingers. We watched characters we’d grown to love over years disintegrate before our eyes. For a superhero movie, it was heavy stuff:

Now, I would bet good money that a lot of those characters will be revived somehow in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame, but still, this was a hell of a way to end a movie, and it almost didn’t happen, as Infinity War cowriter Stephen McFeely revealed to Empire. “We had so much story in those early drafts of Infinity War that, if anything, we thought we maybe shouldn’t do The Snap until the end of act one of Endgame,” he said.

It’s baffling to me that this angle was even considered. Where else would Infinity War have even ended? After Thanos defeated Iron Man and company on Titan, maybe? But that would have felt like a cheap cliffhanger — tune in to see what happens next — rather than the close of Part 1 of a two-part story.

Then again, hindsight is 20/20. Kevin Feige talked about the long road to get to Infinity War’s ending:

"We talked about that ending for years and years and years. It was the reason to adapt Infinity Gauntlet. What was the most shocking thing we could do? End the movie with The Snap."

Agreed.