The Russo Bros. Confirm Where Steve Rogers Really Went in AVENGERS: ENDGAME Timeline

Avengers: Endgame was an excellent cap on the Infinity saga. Though it was sad to lose a couple of major players, it gave us an end to the battle with Thanos, it brought back the people lost to the snap, and it saw many of the characters get to start the rest of their lives. For one character though, we got to see how the rest of his life played out right before our eyes.

At the end of the movie, Captain America, aka Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), takes on the task of returning the borrowed Infinity stones back to the timelines from whence they came, after having used them to reverse the snap and take out Thanos for good. After he returned them, he was to return to the present to assure his friends Sam Wilson, aka Falcon (Anthony Mackie), and Bucky Barnes, aka Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), that the job was done. His return was delayed, but then we saw him sitting on a bench in the distance, returned as an old man after having stayed in the past and lived his life with the woman he was always meant to be with, Peggy Carter. Although this was a sweet ending to Cap’s story, it did make some wonder how he was able to travel back and live a whole life without causing ripples in the timeline.

In a recent interview with the Lights Camera Barstool podcast (via CinemaBlend), director Joe Russo revealed that he and his brother Anthony Russo did have to define what this choice meant for the universe, as the MCU isn’t a place for loose strings to be hanging about. He explained:

“Based on everything that happened, he would have been in a branch reality and then had to have shifted over to this, so jumped from one to the other and handed the shield off. One thing that’s clear that Anthony and I have discussed, I don’t know that we’ve discussed this publicly at all, Cap would have had to have traveled back to the main timeline. That’s something that, yes, he would have been in a branch reality, but he would have to travel back to the main timeline to give that shield to Sam Wilson.”

So there you have it. Though the Russos and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have publicly disagreed about this fact, Joe is pretty adamant that the alternate reality route was the way Cap went, and he neatly traveled back to the original to tie up the loose ends he knew he would have to. I think that makes sense, and it lends to the future of the MCU where this whole next phase is delving into the Multiverse.

This storyline did make people happy for Steve Rogers, but it didn’t tie a bow on his character as much as the studio hoped, I think. Because who wouldn’t want to see a movie all about the life of Steve and Peggy?! I know I would.