10 Twisted Timelines Created By Avengers: Endgame
9. 2012: The Avengers Discover The Time Heist
Following the Avengers interference in 2012, the temptation is to consider Loki’s escape with the Tesseract (aka, the Space Stone) as being the big dramatic change here… but let’s be realistic. Loki’s Wild Ride will probably be the basis of, or an introduction to, his TV show coming up on Disney+ in 2021, but it’s not what makes this a twisted timeline.
No, the pivotal moment comes earlier on, when our Stark flips off the tower and assembles his nanotech Iron Man armour in mid-air… forgetting that this tower belonged to his 2012 counterpart, who has an AI with a sensor array and a camera network to catch him in the act.
Later on that day, 2012 Cap fights his future self and despite losing, will figure out (thanks to that picture of Peggy) that he wasn’t fighting a disguised Loki after all. Meanwhile, 2012 Stark, diagnosing his ‘heart attack’ as sabotage, compares notes with Jarvis and twigs to the presence of another Tony Stark… and that Loki’s vanished, along with the Tesseract and the Sceptre.
2012 Stark’s big brain and ridiculous tech being what it is, it’s not long before he finds out that the doppelganger Stark and Rogers are from the future, although the assumption will probably be that they came to snatch Loki and the artifacts. What does this leave us with? An angry, scared genius with PTSD inventing time travel nine years early to get some payback...