Avengers: Endgame - Captain America & Iron Man's Fates Explained

2. Steve Rogers FINALLY Gets To Live His Life

All his life, all Steve Rogers has ever wanted to do is to fight tyranny. Thanos, an intergalactic megalomaniac hellbent on laying waste to the universe, represents his ultimate challenge, and in bringing him down, Captain America finally finds his peace.

It was a moment that was being built to pretty much since the climax of The First Avenger, and the Russos delivered on it emphatically.

Having thwarted Thanos and attended Stark's funeral, Rogers is left with one last task - to restore the Infinity Stones back to their original destinations in time. As Bruce Banner mentions, it should be a quick five seconds for everyone in the present. However, it soon becomes clear that Steve has taken the long way home, and chose to live the life he was deprived when he fell into the ice in 1945.

Avengers Endgame Peggy Watch — Marvel Studios

Speaking to Sam Wilson while Bucky watches on, an elderly Steve looks off into the sunset with a look of pure content. We see he's wearing a wedding ring, and while he doesn't disclose the identity of his partner to present company, everyone knows it's Peggy Carter. The pair actually get to have their dance, and it is nothing short of what the both of them deserved.

This is Steve's exit from the MCU, and it was pure poetry to see play out. Of course, the whole epilogue was made even better by the exchange he has with Wilson, with Rogers leaving his shield - and with it his superhero identity - to the Falcon.

Ewan Paterson

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.

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