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The massive portal battle where every hero shows up at once took roughly 1,400 visual effects artists working flat out, and they only had around sixteen weeks to pull it off. Given how much is happening on screen in that sequence, that's a genuinely wild turnaround time.
James D'Arcy briefly pops up as Edwin Jarvis, and it's easy to miss why that's a big deal - he's actually reprising a role from the short-lived Agent Carter series. It was the first time a Marvel movie pulled a character over from one of their TV shows.
Out of everything in this three-hour epic, the actual moment Tony snaps his fingers in the gauntlet was the last piece of footage captured for the whole movie, shot during reshoots in January 2019, with the visual effects team still finishing work on it right up until the premiere.
The writers apparently drafted a bunch of dialogue for Tony's goodbye scene, but Downey pushed back hard and insisted the moment land better with Tony saying nothing at all. It's part of why that scene hits as hard as it does - the silence does the work.
With basically the entire MCU cast standing together at Tony's funeral, you'd assume some digital trickery was involved to get everyone in one shot. Nope - every actor was physically there on the same day, and the crew just shot five or six takes of the whole group.
The corridor conversation between Thor and Rocket on Asgard was actually filmed at Durham Cathedral all the way back in April 2017, while the crew was still shooting Infinity War. It's one of the very few Endgame scenes that predates its own production.
When Robert Redford came back for his brief cameo, he apparently told the crew on set that this was going to be his last piece of on-camera acting before stepping away from the profession altogether.
When Steve mutters "Hail Hydra" to get the scepter off Sitwell, it's not just a throwaway gag - it's a direct nod to the Secret Empire comic run, where the real Steve Rogers turns out to be a sleeper agent for Hydra and uses that exact phrase to prove his loyalty.
The whole idea of skipping five years ahead and showing everyone broken and scattered wasn't originally treated as the main plot. It started life as a side concept the writers jokingly called their "What If?" section back when they were first mapping out the two films.
An early draft had a much darker beat where Thanos opens a portal to reveal he'd already been to the battlefield and tosses the head of the 2012 version of Captain America onto the ground in front of the heroes. Understandably, it never made it past the drawing board.
