The filmmakers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have usually stayed away from specific dates in order to avoid potential continuity issues – it’s hard to keep track of all the different movies in the franchise, after all. Last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming massively dropped the ball on this, however, by claiming that the wall-crawler’s solo outing took place eight years after the events of The Avengers.
This drove fans crazy as it ripped a hole through the MCU’s timeline. Assuming that The Avengers is set in the year of its release, 2012, that means Homecoming takes place in 2020. Seeing as it was set just a few months after Captain America: Civil War though, that means it also had to be placed in the same year. And obviously, that can’t be possible since Civil War was said to be set eight years after the events of 2008’s Iron Man – so in 2016.
In short, it just doesn’t add up. Clearly, whoever came up with that “8 Years Later” caption in Homecoming made a bit of a mathematical error somewhere along the line, and it’s one that the head honchos at Marvel seem to regret.
In an interview as part of the Avengers: Infinity War press junket, director Joe Russo was asked a question about how long after The Avengers did Homecoming take place. He knew the answer immediately, of course, saying “Oh, it was eight years, I believe.” The interviewer then pointed out that the time jump “was quite controversial,” with which Russo agreed, stating that: “Yes, it was a very incorrect eight years.”
In the grand scheme of things, this is a small-scale mistake that doesn’t damage the movie as a whole. Yet, it’s still surprising that no one at Marvel Studios managed to catch the blunder before Spider-Man: Homecoming was released. In any case, Russo and producer Trinh Tran’s reaction in this interview suggests that the higher-ups at the studio are well aware of it and likely won’t pull something similar again.
