This post is about the ending of The Avengers: Infinity War. If you haven’t seen the ending of Infinity War (including the post-credits scene) this will SPOIL it for you (especially the post-credits scene). We cannot stress this enough.
Do we need to stress it some more? OK, fine.
SPOILERS BELOW. Spoilers for a WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF THAT HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE INFINITY WAR.
So. You’ve just seen Infinity War.
You’ve invested years and hundreds of dollars and many, many feelings into these characters and these bonkers plotlines about chasing little glow-stick cubes around the entire galaxy.
And you sat there during the first five minutes going “OK, well, I’ve heard that some characters die. And just this is pretty crushing given we were fully invested in getting all those people out of Asgard at the end of Ragnarok, so maybe it’s-
“OH S**T THEY KILLED LOKI. AND BLEW UP THOR.”
And then Thor is actually OK and you wonder if they’ve just kept the killing to a bunch of poor Asgardians and one fan favourite who has, admittedly, done some pretty messed-up stuff.
And then they kill Gamora.
And then Thanos wins, and there’s no deus ex machina – even the literal god fails to stop him. It all goes completely to s**t.
And now we’re all in the denial phase: that can’t be for real, right? They did not just make us sit through a devastating, weeping Tom Holland death scene?
(Hopefully none of you are having those conversations loudly as you exit the cinema next to queues of waiting fans.)
Well, yes and no. And here’s why.
It’s not like the franchise wouldn’t survive without, say, Bucky and Sam and Wanda and Vision and Maria Hill and, yes, even Loki or Dr Strange. All those characters could have been sacrificed for the sake of a devastating ending and a film with real emotional stakes. (Killing Groot twice? Colder than one of Steve’s naps.)
But T’Challa, Star-Lord, Peter f**king Parker – these are heroes. They are tentpoles.
They… all have another movie coming out.
Marvel has confirmed Black Panther 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 and James Gunn has confirmed Guardians Of The Galaxy 3. Unless all of those were a massive fake-out for the sake of not spoiling the fact that they’re killing half the main cast for ever and evers – and unless Marvel and Disney are suddenly averse to making money – they’re coming back.
Fans who aren’t used to comic book storytelling’s flexible relationship with the whole “death is permanent” thing might be seriously worried. But there’s an old geek proverb: “Nobody stays dead, except for Uncle Ben.”
(The full saying used to be “…except for Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben”. Only the last is still true.)
“Also, I signed on for nine movies, so if I’m for reals deady-bones that’s a lot of flashbacks.”
Every one of your MCU faves has died at least once in the comics. There are as many ways to bring a character back as there are universes.
Sometimes a death is revealed to have been faked. Sometimes someone is full-on resurrected through magic or – as was done to Phil Coulson after he died in Avengers 1 – through technology. (Though Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. makes clear that the resurrection process is beyond horrifying.) Sometimes a character is brought in from a different timeline where they’re still alive, or we just jump into one and basically abandon the universe where all our faves are dead.
The most likely option here, though, is a good old reversal-via-timey-wimey-stuff.
In the post-credits scene, Fury scrambles for what looks like a 90s-style pager before he, too, gets ashed, and it manages to get through. And that’s Captain Marvel’s insignia on the screen.
Carol Danvers – the most powerful superhero in the MCU so far – is coming.
We already know Captain Marvel is set in the 90s, so it’s highly likely that the main movie will be her origin story, and then a post-credits scene will tie her story back to the current-day Avengers timeline when she gets Fury’s page from the future.
Then she’ll either do something in the 90s to fix our current timeline, or (more likely, given she’s “more or less confirmed” to be in the-title-itself-is-a-spoiler-you-guys Avengers 4) she’ll travel forward in time to join the remaining Avengers in 2019… and then do something to fix the current timeline.
Fury only pages Captain Marvel once he realises that Thanos has won, so clearly it’s the absolute last resort, or he would have done it before Thor cooked it by not going for the head. (Yes, I’ve determined that it’s all Thor’s fault.)
And this is all part of Strange’s one-in-14-million plan – when he tells Tony Stark that handing the Time Stone over to Thanos “was the only way”, he probably didn’t mean it was the only way to ensure most of their mates floated off in a cloud of the world’s most depressing confetti.
Anyway, so that’s why even manbabies who freak out about movies having ladies in them should be looking forward to Captain Marvel, which is currently not quite halfway through filming and due out March 2019.
But while they’re totally going to fix it all in 2019’s movies – this year’s Ant-Man is likely to be set before the events of Infinity War – the Infinity War ending is also going to force Marvel to decide whether Netflix’s Defenders shows are actually in the same continuity as the MCU movies.
If Luke Cage season 2 – due June this year – doesn’t start with Luke and Claire having a conversation about how sad it was that literally half the people in the world suddenly died, I’m going to throw stuff.