Avengers: Endgame - What Happened To The Dead Heroes?

Just how exactly are 'The Fallen' avenged?

Avengers Endgame Fallen
Marvel Studios

Avengers: Endgame is finally here. Over a year since Thanos lay waste to half the sentient life in the known universe, Earth's Mightiest Heroes assemble once again to try and save those who were lost. They are - unsurprisingly - successful, but how exactly does it go down in the film itself?

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Immediately after Infinity War drew to a close, Marvel fans and moviegoers in general racked their brains as to how those killed by Thanos' victory could return. It was always a matter of when - not if - they would return (no matter how hard Marvel tried to convince us otherwise), with the already announced Spider-Man: Far From Home and Guardians 3 having confirmed that those characters were never really dead, while the likes of Black Panther and Doctor Strange were both braced for sequels in the not-so-distant future.

At one point, the amount of theories floating around online felt almost endless, with come convinced that the surviving team would steal back the Time Stone, while others - spurred on by the then recent developments of Ant-Man and the Wasp - felt assured that the Quantum Realm would have a big part to play. Although in what capacity was then still unclear.

With the film now out, it transpires that only one of those theories was correct, and it was of course the one weighted by the evidence provided in the first Ant-Man sequel...

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.