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That little girl practicing archery with Clint in the cold open isn't just any child actor - it's Ava Russo, daughter of director Joe Russo. Nice bit of nepotism that actually pays off emotionally given what happens to the rest of the family seconds later.
That gut-punch opening with Hawkeye's family turning to dust was actually written for Infinity War. It got pulled because the editors felt that film was already jumping between too many characters, so it got saved and used to kick off Endgame instead.
Marvel is notoriously paranoid about leaks, and on Endgame they took it to another level - most of the cast only got the pages for their own scenes. Robert Downey Jr. was reportedly the sole actor trusted with the complete script front to back.
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely didn't just sit down one day and bang out Infinity War and Endgame. They started plotting both films years earlier during downtime on the Civil War set, scribbling ideas while the cast was off filming other scenes.
Before either film had a proper screenplay, the writing team had already compiled roughly 60 pages of concepts and possibilities for how the two-part finale could play out. A lot of that never made the cut, but it shows how much was thrown at the wall.
Robert Downey Jr. has a habit of sneaking food onto set to keep himself going through long days, and a lot of Tony Stark's snack moments came from that habit rather than the script. The bit where he offers everyone food around the table apparently wasn't planned at all.
Somehow Paul Rudd managed to juggle shooting Endgame and Ant-Man and the Wasp during overlapping windows. Keeping two separate Scott Lang timelines straight in his head while bouncing between sets sounds like a headache, but you'd never know it from the finished films.
That line Morgan says to Tony wasn't dreamed up in a writers' room - Robert Downey Jr. mentioned that one of his own children says something similar to him at home, and the filmmakers loved it so much they wrote it straight into the movie.
At one point there was a scene inside the Soul Stone where a teenage Morgan Stark, played by 13 Reasons Why's Katherine Langford, tells her dad it's okay if he doesn't make it back. It's a mirror of the Thanos-and-young-Gamora scene from Infinity War, but it ended up on the cutting room floor rather than the final film.
That glimpse of Jane Foster you catch isn't new footage at all. It's an outtake recycled straight from Thor: The Dark World - Portman never stepped on set for Endgame, so her actual return had to wait for a later Thor film.
