Avengers: Endgame he opened a can of worms when he introduced the concept of time travel and various timelines, showing the most powerful heroes on Earth potentially creating dozens and dozens of branched realities in their quest to recover the Infinity Stones of the past. And one of those branched realities was very tempting for Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), who would decide to retire and live to old age with his true love, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell)
But has it changed the past? Or he traveled back to the main timeline to finally reunite with Bucky (Sebastian Stan) and Sam (Anthony Mackie) as an old man? Directors, the Russo brothers finally cleared up the oldest mystery surrounding the Avengers: Endgame Timeline.
In an interview with the Lights Camera Barstool podcast (via CinemaBlend), Joe Russo revealed that he and his brother Anthony Russo came up with an “internal logic that we define in the room” in relation to some of the most tangled concepts of time travel in Avengers: Endgame. The most potentially complicated: the Steve Rogers timeline or the question of whether he changed the past or simply jumped from an alternative timeline. For the Russo brothers, it was the last.
“Based on everything that happened, he would be in a branching reality and then he would have had to switch to that, so he jumped from one to the other and handed over the shield,” said Joe Russo, explaining:
“One thing that is clear that Anthony and I discussed, I don’t know if we discussed this publicly, Cap would have had to travel back to the main timeline. This is something that, yes, he would be in a branched reality, but he would have to travel back to the main timeline to give that shield to Sam Wilson. “
It turns out that there has been some internal disagreement on this topic before, with Russians and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely disagreeing about whether Cap was in a secondary reality. But the brothers are struggling and doubling their interpretation, which aligns with the slow provocation of the multiverse by the Marvel Cinematic Universe: we are seeing the beginning of this in WandaVision, and will continue to be explored in Spider-Man 3 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And it allows the Russo brothers to avoid dealing with the complicated mess of time travel logic, and whether Steve’s reunion with his lost love in the past may have sent waves into the future. He was just living in retirement in an alternate reality, before deciding it was time to hand Sam the Captain America mantle.
Interestingly, while this revelation puts a cool finish on Steve Rogers’ story, it kind of opens the door to a whole new story of Cap’s adventures in this alternate timeline – a possibility considering the rumors that Chris Evans may or may not be replaying your role as Steve Rogers at some point in the future. It is probably not so involved, considering that the actor was happy to put the MCU behind him, but anything is possible, right?
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