She-Hulk head writer Jessica Gao has revealed some of the original finale ideas that didn't make it past the pitching and scripting phase.
"I think I probably wrote like, 20 versions of a finale that went all over the place and I started feeling like, 'Well, this is a Marvel show, I better give them the classic Marvel ending,'" Gao told Marvel's official site.
While She-Hulk eventually went meta with its finale, poking holes in Marvel's tendency to deliver the same third act over and over, the show nearly went down the same path with a "big villain fight."
"But it never felt right because I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole," Gao explained.
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige (not K.E.V.I.N), was the one to set Gao on the course of the mind-bending fourth wall break that involved Jen crashing out of her own show and confronting She-Hulk’s own writers.
"'No one's telling you to do that, you don't have to do that, you can do something completely different, we should be doing something completely different because this show is so different from anything that Marvel has done,'" Gao recalled of Feige's advice. "It was getting that permission from him that really made me think, ‘Oh.’ It just changed everything."
That's not all that changed from the initial idea to the finished product. Hilariously, Feige shot down the idea of K.E.V.I.N wearing a literal baseball cap ("That doesn't make a lick of sense," according to renowned baseball cap-wearer Kevin Feige) while Kevin was also envisioned to be a suave "James Bond-type man" in a tuxedo. The writers' room seemingly briefly played around with the idea that it would be played by someone like George Clooney or Jon Hamm. With apologies to George Clooney, we prefer the robot.
For more on what the MCU is cooking up next, be sure to check out our guide to upcoming Marvel movies and our breakdowns of Marvel Phase 5 and Marvel Phase 6.
