While Avengers: Endgame answered most of the questions that Avengers: Infinity War left, it seems like it does disprove one of the claims made by Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige about Thanos’ snap.
The movie gave closure to the Infinity Saga with a few characters exiting the MCU and others getting a new beginning.
It managed to answer questions like how did Tony Stark end up back on Earth and where was Captain Marvel before she got paged by Nick Fury. But it ignored one of Feige’s claims about the snap and did nothing to support it, leaving many fans to wonder whether Thanos’ snap actually included plants and animals.
In July, Feige told Birth Movies Death that the snap wiped out animals and plants as well as humans because Thanos’ goal was to get rid of half of all living things.
In August he took to Twitter to once again confirm Thanos did, in fact, do that, but his claims aren’t really matched onscreen.
In the movie, when the Hulk snaps everyone back, we get the tiniest hint that Feige’s theory is true when we hear birds chirping all of a sudden, but that doesn’t totally support the claim.
In the opening scene of the movie we see Clint Barton and his family moments before the snap, but the only things that disappear are his wife and kids, the trees and plants surrounding him stay put.
The same thing happens in Infinity War in Wakanda, why didn’t any of those plants get dusted?
So, it seems quite weird that Feige would keep saying this when there’s barely anything in the movie that would suggest that this is the case. It’s possible he and co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo simply have different ideas of how the snap works – the Russo brothers famously don’t agree with the movie’s writers about how time travel works in the film.
The Smithsonian Magazine spoke to a bunch of scientists to discover what would actually happen if half of all living things were to disappear and it’s not great…
Entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told them that “it would be very chaotic”.
“It would be very chaotic, and I don’t even know how you would snap your fingers in an ecologically sustainable way.”
“You would have problems with all the ecosystem services that insects are responsible for, including removing dead bodies or pollination services,” she added.
Thanos’ snap would also be devastating to large mammals and other carnivores according to the mag.
They wrote, “With half the world’s life gone, small animals like rats could come to inherit the Earth while larger species simply die out. In the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, for example, when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago and helped snuff out the dinosaurs, some 75 percent of all species were lost, but small, rodent-like mammals managed to survive and adapt.”
If the Avengers weren’t able to reverse Thanos’ destruction, the universe probably wouldn’t have recovered for millions of years, so thank God they figured out a way!