Why Marvel Studios Keeps Cutting Storylines, From Quantumania's Ending to Gorr's Missing Killing Spree

Marvel Studios has built a reputation for tinkering with its storylines through reshoots and costly postproduction scrambles, and I set out to investigate why so much keeps getting removed. My conclusion: the problem is not leaks, improvisation or the writers, but a slate so crowded that we are not suffering a shortage of storylines so much as an oversupply of expectations.

As a joke, I opened with a wish list for Kevin Feige: if Marvel could alter She-Hulk to drop a subplot and put Daredevil back in, could it also restore Quantumania's ending where Scott dies, put Gorr's killing spree back into Thor: Love and Thunder, or rework WandaVision so that Mephisto actually shows up? The final products look less like the cake that was pitched and more like something that needed a bit more time to cook.

Quantumania's cake ending was a last minute reshoot

Speaking of cakes, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ends with Scott Lang picking one up, and that ending was confirmed to be a last minute reshoot by set photos of Paul Rudd taken in January 2023, just one month before the premiere. VFX artists claimed entire sections of the final act were fully animated action, with no on set shots from actors to work from.

Leaked subtitles of the film suggested that a previous version would end with Scott and Hope trapped in the quantum realm. At the time, Marvel was suing in federal court to try to track down the source of that leak, so it was probably legit. The screenwriter confirmed that ending was at least considered.

There was also major news at the time: Marvel executive Victoria Alonso, one of Kevin Feige's right hands, had just parted ways with the studio.

Wakanda Forever, Love and Thunder and Multiverse of Madness all lost material

According to director Ryan Coogler, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was originally a father and son story about T'Challa returning after five years of the Blip to realize he has a son. When Chadwick Boseman died, the film was reconfigured into a Shuri story. Even then, there were reports of a removed romantic subplot between Shuri and Namor after editors confirmed the second act was completely reworked. There was also alleged concept art of Doctor Doom in a post credits scene that never came to be, though, like a lot of alleged concept art, we don't know if it was just pitched or ever actually considered.

Thor: Love and Thunder removed scenes in which characters played by Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage and Jeff Goldblum were murdered by Gorr, but Taika Waititi told Insider he cut these scenes because they weren't good enough. Christian Bale told IGN he shot scenes in which Gorr slices out his tattoos. Instead we got Gorr the God Butcher, who hardly does any butchering.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness originally opened with Wanda Maximoff decapitating Mordo, a moment shown in poster art and later confirmed in concept art and storyboards. On She-Hulk, writer Jessica Gao said the team reordered episodes and changed the pilot in postproduction, which left Titania's backstory unexplained.

Marvel does not appear to change plots just because they leak

Every time a subplot is removed, the reason is specific to that production, but observers tend to lump Marvel's reworkings into two categories: keeping audiences surprised, or adjusting to constantly shifting studio priorities. On the first, some have heard that Marvel changes its storylines after plots leak. With more work happening on home setups, the risk of secrets leaking via roommates or family members passing work screens has grown. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spider-Man: No Way Home saw leaks of its trailer, set video of Andrew Garfield, and images of Charlie Cox and Tobey Maguire.

But Kevin Feige has said you need to make sure the experience itself works regardless of what has been spoiled. So far, "we just do not have real evidence of Marvel actually changing the storyline" because some fans who were going to see the movie on opening weekend anyway saw a blurry image on Reddit. The entire plot summary for Eternals leaked eight months before release, and Marvel stayed the course.

Feige knows these are comic storylines that have been known for years, so it is less about knowing what happens than seeing that spectacle on a big screen. If a storyline is dropped or reshot, that is often because the studio feels it doesn't properly wow audiences enough to get them to theaters or to sign up for Disney Plus. It needs to be a worthy upgrade from reading the comic book version.

I don't buy the "Rick and Mortification" of the MCU

Expectations do sometimes get intentionally subverted. Some critics have talked about the "Rick and Mortification" of the MCU, arguing that writers coming from that subversive animated comedy, such as Jeff Loveness, the writer of Quantumania, and Jessica Gao, the head writer of She-Hulk, overcomplicate MCU scripts with meta twists.

I don't agree with that. She-Hulk was a meta character in the comics. If anything, these writers are on brand with the MCU's playful tone set by people like Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon and James Gunn. As I see it, "this is what the MCU has always been."

Kevin Feige's Brain Trust and outsourced previz shape every title

The more cynical explanation is shifting studio priorities. The MCU is a complex slate of dozens of projects in varying stages of development and production that all need to sync as part of one master plan. Marvel centralizes that plan at the top with Kevin Feige and his executives, Louis D'Esposito, Stephen Broussard, Nate Moore, Brad Winderbaum and a few others, whose names appear as executive producers beside the director and head writer on every Disney Plus title. All major decisions on world building, character introductions and crossover events run through this Brain Trust. Victoria Alonso used to be part of it but no longer was, raising more questions about what is going on at Marvel.

The Brain Trust has ensured quality across the slate by taking over the more critical visual aspects of every title and outsourcing them to storyboard artists, previz artists and stunt previz teams. Previz, or previsualization, means mapping sequences out with art and animation before they are shot. Cap's fight with Thanos in Endgame, with Cap using Mjolnir to bat the shield, came from the stunt coordinator's stunt previz choreography. Some critics say this outsourcing is too chaotic, and that everything should stem from one filmmaker's vision and one ironclad script that never changes.

Films are written three times, and Infinity War's moon throw was found in post

Steven Spielberg may preach "if it ain't on the page it ain't on the stage," but filmmaking is a collaborative art form in which a film is written three times: when the script is written, rewritten when it is shot, and rewritten again when it is edited. When Christopher McQuarrie began shooting Mission: Impossible Fallout, he said he didn't have a finished script, just an outline.

The Russo Brothers confirmed that Infinity War's shot of Thanos throwing the moon, and the exact look and timing of the dusting, were found in post. The famous "I am Iron Man" line that kicked off the MCU was ad libbed by Robert Downey Jr. So the problem isn't improvisation, the writing or the leaks.

Marvel's output jumped from about 7 hours in 2019 to nearly 35 in 2021

In 2019 there were 7 hours and 14 minutes of Feige overseen MCU content across three movies: Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home. I excluded ABC and Netflix Marvel titles because Feige didn't directly oversee them. In 2020 there was nothing because of Covid. In 2021, with four films and five Disney Plus shows, it rose to 34 hours and 42 minutes. In 2022, with three films, three shows and two special presentations, it was 22 hours and 4 minutes: three to five times as much storytelling, with compounding ways for those stories to interconnect.

With the troubled production behind Blade, rumors swirled that Feige might be spread too thin. VFX artists who opened up about Quantumania said they had to split time between it and Wakanda Forever, and deprioritize Quantumania. Feige planned to scale back the number of titles per year, and returning Disney head Bob Iger said not every Marvel hero needs a third or fourth movie, hinting we might not have needed an Ant-Man 3 or a Thor 4. Quantumania's ending might have been reshot simply because the original set up Iron Lad and the Young Avengers, and Disney no longer had the bandwidth to pull that off.

We are suffering an oversaturation of expectations

Seventeen titles in two years, with more announced, means hundreds of ideas in the mix, a studio outsourcing its previz to guarantee billion dollar spectacle, and dozens of teams per title working on home computers. Some of that experimentation will inevitably leak and give fans a false promise, and when it doesn't show up, they feel what was taken from them. As I put it: "we're not suffering a deprivation of storylines we're suffering an oversaturation of expectations."

This might be why Marvel's big bads keep fixating on erasing chunks of reality, with Thanos saying "as long as there are those that remember what was there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be." As Tony Stark responds, we Marvel fans are all kinds of stubborn. So for anyone mourning erased storylines, maybe if Marvel announced fewer of them, we would cherish the little we did have instead of defaulting to asking what else they've got.

Would announcing fewer projects make you value Marvel's storylines more, or is the cut material what you miss most?