Avengers: Endgame: Mark Ruffalo Actually Did Spoil The Ending
Contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame
If only Mark Ruffalo had a time machine.
The notorious spoiler-spiller, who plays Bruce Banner in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, kept a buttoned lip and a cool demeanor during the promotional cycle for Avengers: Endgame. After inadvertently spoiling the ending of Avengers: Infinity War, accidentally live-streaming part of Thor: Ragnarok during the film's world premiere, revealing the title of Endgame before it was announced, and getting "fired" from the MCU for not zipping his mouth, Ruffalo has done a respectable job of not repeating his past mistakes in the lead-up to Endgame.
Or so we thought.
It turns out that Ruffalo actually did spoil Avengers: Endgame several weeks ago, when he let slip a major plot point that comes at the end of the film.
Spoilers ahead!
Speaking in an interview with E! News alongside Captain America actor Chris Evans and Nebula actress Karen Gillan, Ruffalo revealed that Endgame co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo had him shoot five different endings for the film, and that the directing duo never gave him a complete script. The actor said that he didn't know the true conclusion of Ending during filming, and would have to wait until the movie opened in theaters to find out which of the various endings the Russo brothers wound up using in the theatrical cut.
Ruffalo explained, "I didn't even get a whole script of this movie. I don't know why. The script I did get had dummy scenes in it."
This checks out: The Russos have a history of withholding from actors full scripts, having done exactly that with Avengers: Infinity War in order to ease actors of the burden of trying to keep everything a secret. They have also tricked stars with fake sequences for the very same reason.
The Hulk star then pointed to Evans and joked, "He gets married in this!"
Ha-ha, super funny, Ruffalo. What a goofy guy! Captain America tying the knot in Avengers: Endgame? Please, that could never happen!
Except it did.
What everyone watching this interview took as an example of one of the "dummy scenes" Ruffalo read in his copy of the Avengers: Endgame script turned out to be entirely factual — not a fake story detail but the real ending of the superhero ensemble.
After Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr.) funeral following the Avengers' final battle against Thanos (Josh Brolin), his Black Order, and his legion of shape-shifting Chitauri, Captain America leaps back to the past via the Quantum Realm and returns the Infinity Stones to the locations from which the heroes snatched them up during their time heist earlier in the movie. Cap goes it alone, but doesn't snap back to the present after the five seconds allotted for the mission have passed.
Endgame reveals that once Steve Rogers nestled all six Infinity Stones in the places they belong — the Soul Stone on Vormir, the Space Stone back inside the Tesseract, the Mind Stone in the Scepter, the Time Stone with the Ancient One at the Sanctum Sanctorum in Greenwich Village, the Reality Stone with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Asgard, and the Power Stone on Morag — he retired as Captain America, remained in the past, reunited with his love Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), and grew old. Steve then resurfaces in the present, in the year 2023. After he explains to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) that his journey to return the Stones went well and that he simply chose to stay back and live the life he always wished he could have, Steve shakes Sam's hand. At that moment, a wedding band can be spotted on his left-hand ring finger. Steve stays coy about who his wife is, but an adorable dance sequence between him and Peggy that caps off Avengers: Endgame proves that the lady in question is indeed her.
So, yeah — Ruffalo 100 percent spoiled Endgame ahead of time. However, he probably didn't even know he was spoiling the movie when he rattled off the line about Cap getting married. It sounds like Ruffalo's script was chock-full of fake scenes, so it's not difficult to imagine that the actor had a hard time distinguishing what was real from what was totally made-up. In fact, the other infamous spoiler-spiller of the MCU, Spider-Man star Tom Holland, admitted to just that during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live ahead of Avengers: Infinity War's debut.
Holland said that he thought the Infinity War scenes that see Spider-Man head to space alongside Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) were fabricated, because he couldn't believe that the friendly neighborhood hero would really journey to the cosmos to fight Thanos.
"I heard the rumor about the fake script stuff and I was reading what I thought was a fake script because it was like, 'Spider-Man's in space!'" Holland revealed. "So I didn't finish it, but I found out it was real."
That's the catch-22 of the Russo brothers' fake scripts: While they do help achieve the goal of keeping actors in the dark and thus keeping spoilers from leaking, they also confuse the cast to the point that they can't tell what's true and what's false. Actors can mistakenly assume that the things that sound fake, like Spider-Man going to space or Captain America getting hitched, really are fake, and think that those details are fair game to discuss in interviews. It would be like if Paul Rudd read a scene where Ant-Man punches Thanos in the face and promptly yells "That's what you get, evil Barney!" at him. It doesn't seem like a moment that would truly happen, so Rudd could run with it as something to talk about in press junkets, since interviewees always ask if the actors can reveal a detail or two about the film. Ruffalo likely thought that the idea of Captain America settling down and marrying someone was too out-there to be true, and thus believed he was in the clear to talk about it.
Taking all that into consideration, we can't place too much blame on Ruffalo. Fingers crossed he doesn't get fake-fired from the MCU a second time.