Avengers: Endgame - What Does The Ending Really Mean?

10. The Stones Are Gone - But What About Doctor Strange?

There were a lot of questions about how the Avengers would attempt to either undo or reverse the Snap in Endgame, with various ideas tossed around regarding the fate of the Infinity Stones in particular. Would they be destroyed? Would the Avengers find a way of keeping them safe?

Instead, they go into the past to retrieve the Stones, and then at the very end, Cap goes to put them back into the moment in time they were taken from. So the Soul Stone goes back to Vormir, the Aether goes back to Asgard in 2013, the Tesseract back to 1970 and so on.

That means the Infinity Stones are where they need to be, and can't be used in movies set in the present or future of the MCU. Their journey will end with them being destroyed, but it also means they could be revisited, should Marvel ever decide to, in those in-between movies. That seems unlikely given this was the Infinity Saga and it has now wrapped up, but it's still possible, yet even their absence will have a major impact on one movie in particular.

Doctor Strange was the guardian of the Time Stone, like the Ancient One before him. The Time Stone was crucial to his solo movie and indeed his powers, so if he's not going to have it in Doctor Strange 2, what does that mean for the would-be Sorcerer Supreme? Well, interestingly, there is a comics precedent for the Time Stone surviving while the others are destroyed, which comes from Jonathan Hickman's 2013 Infinity storyline (which was an inspiration for Infinity War), so there's a chance the Time Stone does come back after all.