Avengers Infinity War premiered on 27th April 2018. The film brought us death and destruction and it showed the reality of being a hero in a cosmic age. The fear of Thor from the first Avengers movie has come true. Thanos has come for us all. Like the God of Thunder warned Fury,
“Your work with the Tesseract is what drew Loki to it… and his allies. It is a signal to the Realm that Earth is ready for a higher form of war!”.
The God of Thunder was never wrong in his assessment. Infinity War proved that Marvel foreshadowed their biggest event at their infancy. Well, chops to them for that. But what do I do about all the dead heroes? I know some fans are very concerned about that. I hear that there is gonna be some time travel involved in the movie, I wonder if the story of the entire universe will remain as cohesive as it is now.
In the recent theories (and most recently after the after credits scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp), the fandom believes that Avengers 4 will most definitely be a time travel movie. But to what degree do the Avengers plan to alter the past, and what about the repercussions, the consequences of time travel. If time travel in movies has taught us anything, it’s that time is not like a river that flows only in one direction, no, time is more of a sea that rages in its own glory. Ere are mighty beasts waiting for you when you go out to sea. In the realm of time travel, these beasts are known as paradoxes. A paradox is defined as ‘a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true.
“The uncertainty principle leads to all sorts of paradoxes, like the particles being in two places at once”
When applied to time travel, it equates to the fact that time travel cannot happen when the same particle (ie the same person) occupies different spaces (or for a paradox to occur the same space) a paradox or an absurd situation is created in time, and we have no idea in the current knowledge of time travel that will occur at such a situation. At this point, you challenge the very basic principles of physics. You may break reality as we know it.
What this equates to in terms of applicability on the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the fact that even if the heroes time travel they cannot change the events as they happened, whatever we have seen has to remain as is for the story to make sense, or else the Avengers will risk the buffer toy affect destroying their realities as they remember it, erasing them from existence. It is completely viable and if you think that’s not true just keep on reading. Because today I’m going to break down the exact plan for a perfect soft reboot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is brilliant in the regard that we experience death with a sense of redemption and the ultimate consequence will be a new beginning setting the pace for the right kind of comic book movies. Setting the pace, making everything right.
Let’s start with the infinity stones and the Avengers and Guardians who are left after the snap. We know that all the original Avengers survived. The Hulk is safe, although he is scared. The God of Thunder is alive and all powered up with a new weapon and his ‘king’ Thor powers. The Black Widow and Captain America are alive, albeit injured and defeated. Iron Man is also okay, although Stark is now stranded on Titan. Hawkeye seems to be alive, we can’t be sure, but his fate is unknown. But the question is why are rocket raccoon and Nebula the only guardians that were left after the snap, well we at QuirkyByte think we might have the answer for the fandom.
You see, every character that has been granted some reprise from the snap of Thanos by the writers had something to do with the infinity gems. Considering the fact that Avengers 4 will most likely be a time travel movie, we can hope to see this fact and this aspect of the snap being touched on in Avengers 4. It won’t be absurd of the fandom to notice that every character left alive has some pertinent information about the original location of an infinity stone and a concrete connection to it. It seems that the directors have intentionally left these characters alive so they can either pass on the information to time travelers of Avengers 4 or travel through time on a quest to get the stones themselves.
If you don’t believe us just review the following information:-
Rocket Raccoon is the only character alive who knows where the power stone was (at the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie).
Nebula is the only character alive who knew the secret location of the soul stone (since her sister revealed it to Thanos while Nebula was being tortured, we’ve already talked about how Steve Rogers might die while recovering this particular stone).
Thor is the only character alive who knows where the Reality Stone was (After the events of Thor: The Dark World the aether was stored with the collector).
Iron Man (And maybe Bruce Banner / Hulk) are the only Avengers alive who know where the time stone was, or who was in possession of the time stone.
The space stone will definitely be recovered after the events of the first Avengers movie and after the current time remnants of our, Avengers come face to face with their past versions.
The mind stone may also be recovered off the body of a beaten Loki after the New York battle, but this will destroy the existence of Vision, you say? Ahh, not really, for there is a theory that Shuri succeeded in her work and Vision can be powered back up now at any given moment.
But what happens when the Avengers do decide to use the Quantum Realm and the power of the time vortex to travel back in time and get all the infinity stones one by one, what happens when the heroes, while collecting materials to save the universe from ‘the snap’ , end up altering past events and making it so (by the laws of the butterfly effect) that the current versions of the Avengers and Infinity War never come to be.
This is a very grim thought but think about it for a moment , this can be the premise and the basis for the actual soft reboot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it. Let’s review the information for one second, all the OG Avengers are still alive and so are Nebula and Rocket Raccoon, giving the earth’s mightiest heroes access to all the information that they might need on their time travel trip.
But the entire plot has a very big and a very nasty complication of the fact that time travel will ultimately end up changing the future/current timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This means that every time the Avengers and the remnants of Guardians of the Galaxy retrieve an infinity stone, it is entirely possible that the Avengers linked to the said infinity stone disappears because their story is now completely changed and the past events are altered (because the future versions have changed something in the timeline leading to the creation of an alternate universe or severe changes in the timeline).
This would mean that we will loose years of character development of core characters, giving them a new persona and soft rebooting the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel can re-iterate character arcs and develop the stories as they want.
Also See: Infinity War Writers Explain Why They Revealed ‘Soul Stone’ the Way They Did