10 Times The MCU Broke Its Own Rules

6. The Iffy Time Travel Logic - Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame took the MCU into some majorly messy directions by tinkering with time travel, yet rather smartly offered up a version of time-hopping which avoided direct causality in favour of a more free-flowing approach to temporal manipulation.

As explained by Professor Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), the film's time travel logic dictates that changing the past doesn't alter the future, but rather, any time someone deviates from the original timeline in the past, it creates a new parallel timeline while leaving the original one undisturbed.

However, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) also implores the Avengers to return the Infinity Stones back to the precise points in time from where they were taken in order to ensure those timelines aren't broken.

Captain America does this at the end of the movie off-screen, but going by the pre-established logic, wouldn't the mere act of travelling back to these timelines to return the stones simply create more branching timelines rather than fix those stone-less ones?

All in all, unpacking the time travel logic of any movie, no matter how smart, is just a huge headache, and Endgame sure is no exception.