10 MCU End Scenes That Were Scrapped

3. Iron Man's Gory Death (Avengers: Endgame)

Avengers Endgame I am Iron Man
Disney

We've seen some pretty violent stuff in the MCU - the Winter Soldier murdering Tony Stark's parents, Thanos getting decapitated by Thor - but obviously, these movies have very strict limitations in terms of how graphic things can actually get.

Blood and guts can't be shown spraying everywhere, and the violence, overall, has to be quite tame. And so, in order to keep things in check, a planned version of Iron Man's death scene had to be scrapped, and replaced with something a bit less gory.

We all remember the moment in Avengers: Endgame: at the end of the final battle, Tony swipes the Infinity Stones from a shocked Thanos, before snapping his fingers and wiping out Thanos' army. This ends up killing Tony, but his sacrifice wasn't for nothing - with his final act, he literally just saved the entire universe.

While Tony is clearly in great pain during this scene, it's still a family-friendly death, but at one point in time, it was going to be a lot more grisly. The original plan was to have Tony's skin bubbling and melting due to the energy of the Stones, but when this was deemed "too gory", the scene was changed to the version we have today.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!