Early in
Avengers: Endgame, a melancholy Black Widow chows down on the loneliest of meals – a peanut butter sandwich on white bread. She’s still grieving those lost in the snap, when who should show up, but good old Captain America himself. What follows is an exchange between the two meant to be a moment of playful levity.
But what if I told you there was a shocking truth behind the Endgame sandwich scene? Continue reading on for the story of the year. No, the story of the century.
Spoilers follow.
As Avengers: Endgame opens, the surviving heroes attempt to undo what Thanos did at the end of Infinity War – and fail. Thanos has destroyed the Infinity stones, and in a fit of rage, Thor chops the Mad Titan’s big, stupid, purple head off. Cut to five years later: the surviving people of Earth are trying to move on, but it’s not easy. Not even for superheroes.
Natasha, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), is one of the few Avengers still holding down the fort. She’s slumming around Avengers HQ wearing sweats, her roots growing out, making herself depression sandwiches. Ever the optimist, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), shows up and gives a little speech about how he saw whales in the Hudson, and how the air feels cleaner, and so on, since half the planet’s population is dead. It’s his valiant, but ultimately ham-fisted, attempt at looking on the sunny side of genocide. And Natasha isn’t having it. She tells Steve that if he keeps trying to tell her to look on the bright side, she’s going to throw her sandwich at him.
Pretty straightforward. A brief, slightly amusing moment between two old friends, with nothing more to it, right? Wrong. Because buried within the context of this scene is a truth so shocking, so devistating, so mind-blowing that it will literally murder you to death.
Or not. In fact there’s no proof that there’s a hidden meaning to this scene at all. However, any readers of Ben Fritz’s engrossing
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, might pick up on something here. Fritz’s
booktracks Hollywood’s journey towards being what it is today – that is to say, an industry hung-up on superheroes and big tentpole franchises. Marvel Studios takes up a big portion of the tome, as does the struggles of Sony (the infamous Sony hacks, in which countless numbers of internal Sony emails were leaked, serve as one of the biggest sources for the book).
Fritz details a lunch meeting between Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, and Sony exec Amy Pascal. The meeting comes a year after Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed to be the mega-blockbuster the studio was hoping for. At the time, Marvel really wanted to bring Spider-Man into the MCU, but Sony had a firm grip on the web-slinger. Feige, seizing on Sony’s struggles with Spidey, attempted to broach the subject of bringing the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Pascal was appalled, so much so that she threw her food at Feige:
At a lunch on a patio outside [Amy Pascal’s] office, in the summer after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, [Kevin Feige] pitched his fellow creative executive on the benefits of having Marvel Studios produce the next film, so that Peter Parker could join the same cinematic universe as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. “I love Spider-Man and I want to help,” he told her.
Pascal was so offended, she threw her sandwich at Feige and told him, playfully but truthfully, to “get the fukk out of here.” Turning the character over would be an insult, she felt, not jut to her but to the entire studio.
Someone throwing a sandwich at someone else offering what they think is helpful info? Sounds mighty familiar! We’ve cracked this wide open! Unless this is all a coincidence. In which case we’re sorry you had to read this.