10 Major Characters Cut From MCU Movies (And Why)

6. Howard The Duck - Avengers: Infinity War

The Original Plan

Say what you want about all of the achievements the MCU has made over the years, but very little comes close to their finest achievement. No, that's not the Oscars won for Black Panther. Or the money. Or the ability to attract even the most A-list of A-list actors.

It's the fact that they reinvented Howard The Duck - a character so maligned thanks to George Lucas' 1980s movie vision that he was sent permanently to the scrapheap. Well, not quite permanently, because he's back now as a supporting character in the Guardians films and he almost got a chance to appear in Avengers: Infinity War also.

Anthony Russo confirmed to Fandom that he was in one of the drafts of the script:

“We were going to cameo with Ken Jeong, with Howard the Duck... It was (Peter) Quill trying to track down some information from Howard the Duck on some outlier planet and interrupting him during a poker game.”

Why He Was Cut

Russo says that despite how much he loved the scene, it just ended up being narrative flab and was cut: "That was a much-beloved scene by us, but it just didn't end up fitting at all."

He does, however, say that he'd like to make a Howard film, so it's not all bad. He might have been joking, but a man's word on the Internet is his bond.