Avengers 4 Theory: Why Ant-Man Is Key To Time Travel (And Undoing Infinity War)

2. So Why Time Travel?

There are three theories here. Firstly, it could simply be that the heroes travel back in time for recruits - to bring back older versions of themselves to team up and fight Thanos in place of those he killed off. That would be a spectacle, but it's probably the least likely.

Secondly, it could be that the heroes who are snapped out of existence are in fact not gone. Just as Captain America was lost between time and space when he was assassinated in the aftermath of the Civil War comic event, it could be that those heroes were simply sent through the Quantum Realm to points between time. Perhaps time travel is the only way to round them back up?

Most intriguingly of all, the Avengers may be looking for a way to get the Infinity Stones before Thanos does, heading to key points in the past where Infinity Stones were used. So to the second world war, where the Tesseract's location was known and the Battle Of New York, where the Sceptre arrived on Earth...

The only problem there is that the future Avengers would effectively wipe themselves out of existence by changing their own pasts. It would cause an almighty paradox - but it's not entirely unprecedented (it happened in X-Men: Days Of Future Past after all). And it would mean we'd all "wake up" to an MCU for Phase 4 that was completely different. It's still a hard thing to accept, but the truth probably lies somewhere within all three theories.