Avengers: Endgame was a long movie. Some fans said they didn’t feel the three hours and some said they wouldn’t even mind if it was four or five hours long. According to io9’s report of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely‘s panel at San Diego Comic Con 2019, the movie could’ve actually been four or five hours long.

In case those names are unfamiliar to you, the two men are were the writers of all three Captain America movies, Infinity War, and Endgame. Their panel at SDCC was mostly focused on discussing how they wrote Endgame and what it was like working on probably the most ambitious comic book movie of all time (so far).

The panel began with them talking about Dr. Strange‘s fight with Thanos in Infinity War. You probably remember it as the battle where “Starlord messed up”. Yes, that battle. The lost scene was supposed to portray an attempt by Dr. Strange to guilt trip or at least scare Thanos by putting him in a hallucination where he’d be faced with all his past crimes and then be judged guilty by the Living Tribunal.

Dr. Strange and the Living Tribunal.

I would’ve loved to see Thanos become awestruck at one of those trippy world-bending scenes from the Dr. Strange movie but the true loss here is that we could’ve seen the Living Tribunal in an MCU movie! The Living Tribunal is a cosmic entity that pretty much acts as a judge for all the realities and universes within the Marvel comics.

The writers also shared a photo of how they planned Endgame’s time heist. It’s really nice to know that they actually talked to physicists to research about time travel. From that research, they concluded that a single timeline theory wouldn’t have worked and that’s why Captain America had to go back and “cut off the branches”.

Check out how the team behind Endgame and Infinity War worked out the time heist. pic.twitter.com/hlk7xaTC44

— Germain Lussier (@GermainLussier) July 19, 2019

In his return to the Endgame timeline, pre-Infinity War Thanos reappeared with his daugthers, the Black Order, and his entire army. There were versions of this scene where he came back with something more: Captain America’s head. The writers explained that this was one of the ways they planned for Thanos to come back. It would’ve been a really good callback to Thanos’ decapitation at Endgame’s first act. “An eye for an eye” and all that.

There’s a lot more that the writers discussed at the panel and I implore you to give io9’s report a read. You can even listen to the entire panel discussion yourself through Jeff Goldsmith’s (the moderator) podcast here.