SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame ahead.
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Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo have confirmed Katherine Langford's cut role from the film. The 13 Reasons Why and Love, Simon star's involvement with Endgame was only reported in October 2018, making her a late addition to the movie's cast. Naturally, fans spent the months that followed speculating about Langford's character in Endgame and whether she's playing someone important to the MCU's future. Some even went so far as to create artwork of Langford as various Marvel superheroes, like Hawkeye legacy character Kate Bishop.
Ultimately, however, Langford's character wasn't included in Endgame's theatrical cut. Now that people have actually seen the film, though, a whole fresh set of theories have emerged about her role in the story and why it was dropped. One of the new theories (perhaps, the most popular one) suggests Langford was cast as the grown-up version of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts' daughter, Morgan Stark, who appeared to her father in a vision of the future (like the one he had in Avengers: Age of Ultron). Well, wonder no more: the Russo Brothers have confirmed that she did, in fact, play an older Morgan in an unfinished cut of the movie.
In an interview on the HappySadConfused Podcast, the Russos revealed they shot a scene where Langford played a teenaged version of Morgan, who appeared to Tony after he got ahold of the Infinity Gauntlet and snapped Thanos (and his army) out of existence in Endgame. The idea was that Tony had entered the same "metaphysical way station" where Thanos saw young Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War, after doing his original snap. As Joe Russo explained, the sequence was meant to provide Tony with some closure, but didn't really work in the context of the larger movie:
“The intention was that [Tony's] future daughter, because these films are dealing with magic, his future daughter forgave him and sort of gave him peace to go. And the idea felt resonant. But it was just too many ideas in an overly complicated movie.”
Anthony Russo shed some additional light on the matter, explaining that test audiences "didn’t feel an emotional association with the adult version of his daughter. So it wasn’t ringing to us and resonating with us on an emotional level". Their explanation makes sense, all things considered. While Tony shares a few sweet moments with his daughter as a little girl early on in Endgame, there's a whole lot that goes down plot-wise between then and Tony snapping his fingers in the movie's climax. As a result, test audiences may've struggled to automatically make the connection between Morgan as a kid and Langford when she appears for the first time as a teenaged version of the character. It's also different from the parallel moment in Infinity War, which had already shown Thanos meeting a young Gamora in a flashback before she appeared in the "metaphysical way station" post-snap.
Instead, Endgame shows a dying Tony bidding farewell to Pepper and Peter Parker in the real world, shortly after snapping Thanos out of existence. This is followed by a scene where Tony says goodbye to Pepper and Morgan via a previously-recorded message, which seems to serve the same function as Tony's vision of his teenaged daughter. The Russo Brothers didn't clarify if the latter was always in the film during their interview, but it's certainly possible it was added during reshoots as a replacement for Langford's sequence. Whatever the case may be, the final movie version concludes Tony's story on a perfectly satisfying note, so it all worked out. Not to mention, it frees up Langford to play another MCU character altogether (maybe even Kate Bishop in the Hawkeye Disney+ series, like some fans want).
Source: HappySadConfused Podcast [via /Film]
