Avengers: Endgame - What Does The Ending Really Mean?

4. The Timeline

Being a time travel movie, there's a lot of stuff in Avengers: Endgame that has opened up a whole can of worms regarding the timeline, and the potential splitting of it, because this is a film that sees heroes diving into the past and meddling with it.

By the end, however - and this is being deliberately simplistic - things are more or less set. The Ancient One and Hulk's conversation explains that when the Infinty Stones are placed back in their rightful place in time, then the branch universe created by removing it will solidify with the main timeline. Since Cap replaces all the Stones, we can assume that's what has happened, with at least one exception in the form of Loki (since he took an Infinity Stone, he's off in a different timeline, which will almost certainly form the basis of his own Disney Plus show).

But the other point to address here with regards to the timeline is just when the MCU is now set. The MCU did, mostly, work on the basis that movies were set in the year of release, although that was changed when Fury's Big Week suggested most Phase 1 films took place in the course of seven days. It was made more confusing by Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was supposedly set eight years after The Avengers, placing it in 2020, which seemed impossible (and was an error).

Thankfully, Marvel cleaned it up, sort of, with the release of a timeline last year in the book Marvel Studios: The First 10 Years, which corrected that Homecoming was only four years after The Avengers, and Infinity War took place in, interestingly, 2017, not 2018. This movie then picks up five years (and a few weeks) after Infinity War, which would place it in 2022. However, when we go back to 2014 and find Nebula, Gamora, and Thanos, they see the events of the future and state they're happening nine years from now. So even there we have some little deviations, but with just about enough wiggle room to have it work, and means that the 'present' of the MCU is now 2023. That means, going forward, any 'present' MCU movies will be set in our future.