Why there wasn't a multiverse in «Avengers: Endgame»
Attention! Spoiler warning for «Avengers: Endgame». The writers explain how a quantum physicist saved the time travel plot. Besides: There's a very good reason for why the multiverse isn't mentioned.
«Spider-Man: Far From Home» is already becoming the next big Marvel hit: your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man managed to gross over 1 billion dollars world-wide in just under four weeks. Still, «Avengers: Endgame», Spider-Man's predecessor, remains the talk of the town. Even Comic-Con, the world's largest nerd fest, couldn't resist its influence.
Warning: if you haven't watched «Avengers: Endgame» and «Spider-Man: Far From Home», stop reading now! We've entered spoiler territory.
At the aforementioned convention, screenplay authors Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus talked about «Endgame». At the centre of it all: time travel, and why there's no mention of the multiverse in «Endgame». Comicbook.com compiled the most interesting comments.
«Back to the Future» had some massive flaws
Time travel in movies isn't anything new. However, they tend to create nasty paradoxes that all too many movie makers struggle to deal with.
But if you operated by Back to the Future rules, every time you went back and came back, you would have a new Biff’s Casino. So you can imagine that if every time a new universe was created, we would get nowhere, and we wouldn’t know how to solve any one, because which one did what? It was not helpful to us and we were worried that maybe we couldn’t even do this idea.
McFeely was referencing scenes from «Back to the Future: Part 2» – seen by many as the worst part of the franchise. In it, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), accidentally changes the modern day for the worse while time travelling.
The consequence for «Avengers: Endgame» would have been constantly having to deal with the results of time travel – as «Back to the Future: Part 2» had to. This would have meant taking the focus off the actual story surrounding the Infinity Stones.
To clarify whether time travel in «Avengers: Endgame» could work in a different way, McFreely and Markus consulted a quantum physicist.
A quantum physicist told us time travel depicted in «Back to the Future» is bullsh-t and time travel is probably more like quantum travel. If it works, again, which it doesn’t. But with Ant-Man, we had a character who was already involved in quantum reality. We could work with it.
Source: Marvel Studios
So the solution to the problem was to create a new timeline that doesn't change the main storyline as soon as the superheroes change what happened in the past. A multiverse consisting of several parallel dimensions.
What other franchise could do what we were allowed to do? Go back to the other movies to get your six MacGuffins and bring them forward to solve your problem, and allow yourself to do all sorts of emotional triage as you do it – people get to meet their fathers and mothers and whatnot.
New problems with the multiverse
Problem solved? Not quite. The multiverse trick presented the screenwriters with new challenges, mainly for dramaturgical reasons. This is despite the fact that the idea of the multiverse has already been hinted at in earlier Marvel films, such as «Dr. Strange», for instance.
If you go, ‘Yeah, but there are 75 Tonys out there, or 75 billion Tonys out there,’ your drama is gonna suffer, because your stakes are lower. It lessened the finality of their deaths.
Source: Marvel Studios
Your drama is going to suffer. Especially in «Endgame», where the title itself implies an end that might not even exist. The multiverse was flirted with in «Spider-Man: Far From Home» – with the Disney Plus series «WandaVision» and the upcoming «Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness», the concept will be omnipresent.
This may be where I disagree with Marvel or where they’re going, I have no idea where Kevin Feige is going. I don’t know what’s happening tomorrow, I have no idea. But I’m a big believer in stakes, and if you tell me that I can just go get another Natasha and another Tony and we can keep rolling, then particularly my grandma’s gonna go, ‘Why don’t I watch that?’.
That’s why the two authors tried to leave the multiverse as unmentioned as possible in «Avengers: Endgame». Moreover, Professor Hulk not only reminds the other heroes, but also us viewers not to get too involved with the way time travels work. As he says, it's all theory and far too complex anyway.
We had to boil our time rules down to something, and it came down to the stones. The stones are going to hold the universe in place, effectively. Take them out, things start happening.
«Avengers: Endgame» has made 2.79 billion dollars, making it the most successful film of all time (not adjusted for inflation). The next Marvel film is «Black Widow» and will hit cinema screens on 1 May 2020.
I'm an outdoorsy guy and enjoy sports that push me to the limit – now that’s what I call comfort zone! But I'm also about curling up in an armchair with books about ugly intrigue and sinister kingkillers. Being an avid cinema-goer, I’ve been known to rave about film scores for hours on end. I’ve always wanted to say: «I am Groot.»