I sat through the credits as if waiting for a verdict. You felt the theater go quiet, like a heartbeat skipping — the choice landed harder than any stunt. That moment of silence traced back to a decision the writers almost made differently.
People are still lining up for a seven‑year‑old blockbuster
Crowds are buying tickets to a 2019 film that now sits among the highest-grossing movies ever: $2.798 billion (€2.6 billion). That re-release pushed Avengers: Endgame back into headlines and reopened a debate the writers had to settle very early: who goes to Vormir, and who pays the price for the Soul Stone?
Why did Black Widow die instead of Hawkeye?
I heard Stephen McFeely say it plain at a recent Q&A: they tried the opposite. He and Christopher Markus tested a version where Hawkeye died, and the reaction from Marvel staff—especially female employees—was immediate and visceral. The pushback wasn’t fan theory chatter on Reddit or a Twitter thread; it was people in the halls asking the writers not to strip Natasha of her heroic moment and hand it to Clint.
A hallway grabbed the script and made its opinion known
Real-world readers at Marvel read those pages and confronted McFeely in person. That encounter changed the draft. The writers respected that reaction; it wasn’t a design note from upstairs but a corridor intervention from colleagues who knew the character’s history and significance.
McFeely told Forbes the exchange: female employees grabbed him and said, “Don’t you do this to her. Don’t you take her heroic moment and give it to him.” He heard them, and the script shifted. That moment is a rare peek at how collaborative decisions can be in a studio the size of Marvel Studios and how cultural context matters the way box office numbers do.
Did the writers consider killing Hawkeye in Endgame?
Yes. They wrote it, staged it, and then watched how it landed with early readers. The draft was viable on paper: Hawkeye has a stake, his arc is earned, and logistically either could have made the sacrifice. On set, in screenings, and in private reads, however, that version didn’t carry the same emotional freight for many — especially those who saw Natasha’s story as unfinished business.
They needed two people who had a long, complicated bond
Black Widow and Hawkeye had spent movie after movie operating as a duo. That shared history made them the logical pair to send to Vormir. McFeely explained that the design called for two people who loved each other going to retrieve the Soul Stone, and their platonic but intimate history worked dramatically.
Beyond drama, the writers were balancing arcs: Natasha lived with a past she tried to compensate for, while Clint’s story was about family and return. McFeely framed Natasha as someone with “red in her ledger” who’d been trying to make up for it — a line that carried weight in their calculus. He also admitted, half-joking, that part of his job is to make the audience feel as much as possible; that impulse pushed the choice toward Natasha.
Who decided Natasha’s death, and why did it stick?
Markus and McFeely wrote it; Marvel staff reacted; the screenplay was shaped by both creative intent and internal feedback. The final choice stuck because it served Natasha’s arc narratively and because the emotional fallout allowed other characters—Hulk, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Tony—to register loss throughout the film’s climax. The ending keeps mentioning her sacrifice, which magnifies its consequence across the franchise.
The writers wanted the emotional ledger to balance on a hinge
The decision was never trivial. McFeely admitted there was a “sense of dread” about Vormir—that it was the one stop that could change everything. They chose Natasha because her death knit together narrative threads: her search for redemption, the Avengers’ idea of family, and the movie’s need to make the final battle feel owed.
You can trace the choice across the ending: Hulk’s line about trying to bring her back, Clint’s grief, and the way Tony’s own sacrifice echoes the cost paid to reverse Thanos. The writers wanted that cost to be felt, and they shaped it so the audience would carry Natasha’s absence into the film’s last beats — like closing a ledger with a drop of red ink.
Forbes reported McFeely’s remarks after his Q&A, and the conversation has been replayed across platforms from io9 to Twitter and Reddit, where fans debate whether the emotional calculus was fair. I’ll say this as someone who watches screenwriting craft: the choice was surgical, emotional, and subject to the messy realities of human reaction inside a studio.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
Which side are you on — did the writers make the right call, or would Hawkeye’s death have landed harder for you?