Russo Brothers Say Old Cap Has Created A Branch Reality In The MCU

Part of the journey is the end, and given that statement, one of the biggest surprises of “Avengers: Endgame” is that death appears to be permanent for most of its characters (Gamora aside). But one character ending in ‘Endgame’ isn’t a death and gives Marvel and Kevin Feige wiggle room for a return down the road. In the film’s postscript, Chris Evans’s Captain America is sent back in time to put each Infinity Stone back in their rightful places. It just takes a few seconds in that reality for him to return…albeit decades older, as a grizzled Clint Eastwood-type who hands off his shield to Falcon. As the film ends, we see that he decided to stay in the past to spend, at long last, a life with Peggy Carter. The end?

But the ‘Endgame’ directors, the Russo brothers, themselves have recently pointed out that the very existence of an old Captain America in the current day timeline raises a lot of questions. They’ve essentially teased he’s an anomaly that needs to be explained, and it means something else with greater rippling ramifications. “That could be a story for another time…” they recently hinted in a podcast, practically challenging the interviewers to figure out what they’re insinuating without answering anything.

The very reason Cap went back in the first place was to avoid creating branch realities something Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One warned about, and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner found a salve for: without the reality stones in her reality, her reality is doomed. Banner’s solution is to put the stones back in the exact same moment, leave, and all is fixed. The Ancient One agrees, this is Cap’s mission in the end, and he completes it. Throughout, even at the end, Banner warns Caps about creating “nasty” alternative branch realities, and Cap assures him, don’t worry, he’ll “clip all the branches.”

While “Doctor Strange” already confirmed the existence of the multiverse in dialogue, it appears Cap staying longer in the past than he should have and returning as an old man unintentionally did create a branched reality.

Joe Russo confirmed as much in a recent interview with Fox 5 alongside his brother. “When Captain America goes back, he would create a branch reality,” he says. “Now, he would exist in that branch reality with a second Captain America who is frozen in ice. What’s also a story for another time is if he created a branch reality, he would then have to use a Pym Particle to come back.”

It appears that “the other story to tell,” the Russos have been hinting at is the one where Cap goes to find another Pym Particle to return to his original timeline, presumably meeting up with Hank Pym or Ant-Man again (though wouldn’t this be his plan all along; he had one Pym Particle to get back, and he just saved it for 50 years later?)

“The great thing about the MCU is that anything that doesn’t show up on screen, anything that doesn’t become text, is fodder for future storytelling,” Anthony Russo said in a recently Empire Spoiler podcast.

But more to the point and beyond Cap’s possible one last story, it appears that the branch realities—the very ones that they warned about creating—now exist in the MCU (though the whole Loki fiasco in 2012’s New York arguably creates one too).

So, Translation: ‘Endgame’s’ time-traveling antics may not have just provided a potential glimpse at that missing chunk of story that would take place before Cap returns, it may have opened up a whole new can of branch reality worms, the consequences of which could come to affect the MCU at some point. In cleaning up Thanos’ mess, our superhero team conceivably could have created a whole slew of other ones with parallel reality-spanning effects.

At a Seattle ACE convention on Saturday, Evans himself teased the idea of donning the shield once more.

“Look, I understand there’s a lot of things you can question about time continuity, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned working with Marvel, they don’t leave stones unturned,” he said. “They really don’t.”

It’d be smart of us to trust the Marvel veteran’s instincts when pondering the studio’s storytelling future. We’ve believed that the Russo Brothers are done with the MCU, and that may still very well be the case. But depending on what Feige conjures up next for this world, and how much bigger he can go beyond physical outer space, the Russos’ footprint may very well not be fading anytime soon.

“Avengers: Endgame” is back in theaters as it continues vying for “Avatar’s” spot as the biggest movie of all time, at least in this reality.