There are plenty of Easter Eggs hidden in Avengers: Endgame and while it wasn’t the final film in Phase 3 of the MCU, it did manage to wrap up a lot of loose ends. Speaking of loose ends, there is one Easter Egg that no one managed to spot in the film, but now that we’ve seen it we can understand why.
The hidden Easter Egg came to light in a new video made by Cinesite who were part of the VFX team behind the movie.
It occurs in the scene after the team fails to secure the Tesseract in 2012 New York, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers decide to go back further in time to S.H.I.E.L.D’s base in 1970 to get the cube and extra Pym Particles to make the trip back home.
It turns out that the underground bunker where Tony runs into his father Howard Stark, is the same bunker where Arnim Zola, one of the villains from Captain America: The First Avenger, was transferring his consciousness to a computer system as we see in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
In the video, Cinesite reveals one of the computers in the scene at S.H.I.E.L.D features Zola’s face. This makes sense timeline-wise as Zola was still alive in 1970 and would have likely been experimenting with the idea of putting his mind online.
Watch the moment here at 0:41 (though it’s worth watching the whole thing to see the amazing VFX):
In case you don’t really remember Zola, he was Red Skull’s right-hand man and one of the lead scientists at HYDRA. He was captured by Captain America around the end of WWII, but was later recruited to S.H.I.E.L.D.
Zola secretly rebuilt HYDRA while working at S.H.I.E.L.D. and turned Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier.
In 1972, Zola found out he was terminally ill and it was then that he finally put his consciousness inside a computer so he could continue HYDRA’s work from beyond the grave.
In The Winter Solder, HYDRA destroys the computer while trying to kill Steve and Natasha Romanoff.
So, we can see why no one noticed, but it’s a pretty cool Easter Egg by Cinesite!