Most fans were probably disappointed when Nick Fury only showed up for a few minutes to page Captain Marvel in Avengers: Infinity War only to be dusted away after Thanos snapped his fingers. However, it looks like there were actually plans for Fury to have a completely different cameo in the Marvel Cinematic Universe flick.
Avengers: Endgame writer Stephen McFeely worked with Christopher Markus on Infinity War and the scribe has just confirmed to Backstory Magazine that they had a different idea for Fury's cameo (via Comicbook.com). McFeely revealed that Fury was originally going to be paged by Carol Danvers in "probably the second or third draft" of the script.
"I think at one point we thought we'd shoot it somewhere like a train station. So we did a version of that where Nick Fury was between trains," he said.
Interestingly, this could have been how the then-unseen Captain Marvel will be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, McFeely says they changed the train scene as they continued working on both the Infinity War and Endgame scripts.
"I don't even remember where the idea came from. We were handed a job to write two movies out of four, and we knew we could kindly request certain things of those two movies in between [Infinity War and Endgame] that would help lay out the chessboard for our movies. There are bigger puzzles than even just two," he said.
But if you had hopes that there is a version out there where Fury joins the climactic battle in Endgame, it simply never occurred to the writers.
"I mean, how much did you see Winter Soldier in that battle?" McFeely asked. "That's the thing — we sort of got to a point where you're just technically people shooting, you know? So I don't know if we ever had Nick Fury in it."
Either way, it all worked out in the end. We got Fury back and later realized he was actually working on something pretty big in Spider-Man: Far From Home. Perhaps we'll learn more about Fury's secret project in MCU's Phase 4.
Related: Avengers: Endgame Scribe Confirms Captain America Interacted With 'Old Steve'