There were plenty of huge shocks in Avengers: Endgame. Basically every hero we had met over many years gathered in one moment for an epic battle against Thanos, and while the Avengers were triumphant, the loss of Iron Man and Captain America would loom over the world of the MCU for years.
But one of the biggest shocks of the movie came at the very start: a massive five-year time jump from 2018, when Infinity War was set, to 2023. In fact, much of Endgame takes place during this very month — October 2023.
This harsh truth about the sheer scale of the Endgame time jump is revealing something big about the MCU we’re in now: it’s finally catching up with itself. “Present day” in the MCU, when shows like Ms. Marvel and movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania are set, is now 2025, only two years after where we are now. The gap between our world and theirs is narrowing more and more. Hopefully soon, it’ll be eliminated altogether.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe was born into a world identical to ours. Tony Stark palled around with soldiers fighting a very real war, there are constant timely pop culture references, and WandaVision even parodied sitcoms that were still airing well into the Marvel era.
But in recent years, our world and the world of the MCU have started looking incredibly different. Now, the Blip has affected literally everyone on Earth, displacing thousands. Add on top of that some surprise Skrulls and the literal Statue of Liberty rocking a new look, it feels like the MCU isn’t a mirror image of our world, but a fantasy world we escape to.
But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. In an interview with The Direct, Ms. Marvel directors Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi said Kevin Feige advised them not to touch on the Blip at all. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law writer Jessica Gao even revealed to Lifehacker that she doesn’t think the Blip matters at all, that the world has moved on.
Now that the time gap between our world and the MCU is narrowing, it’s looking like the world-building gap between the two is narrowing too. There can still be multiversal adventures, town-wide spells, and hopping between times with the Time Variance Authority, but for the first time in a long time, it looks like the life of the average person in the MCU is finally starting to look like ours.
Avengers: Endgame released something into the MCU that would irreparably change the experience of anyone in it. But now we’re in that fateful month, we can see how the world can begin to grow and heal — and finally come closer to our world both in chronology and in world-building.
