Last month, Marvel released a deleted scene from the recent Avengers: Endgame in which James Rhodes asks Steve Rogers a question that has been bothering a section of the MCU fanbase for years: Why didn’t Cap jump out of the plane before it crashed?
For those in need of a recap, 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger concluded with Steve crashing a plane into the Arctic in order to neutralize the bombs on board. Sadly, his heroic act came at a price, as Chris Evans’ character spent the next few decades as a frozen “Capsicle.” In the subsequent Captain America: The Winter Soldier, however, the Super Soldier showed himself to be perfectly capable of jumping out of a plane and into the water, raising the question of why he didn’t do the same in his first movie.
In the eyes of many fans, this inconsistency serves as one of the MCU’s biggest plot holes, but in a new article from ScreenRant, the case is made that Steve’s sacrifice makes a lot more sense than War Machine seems to think. Essentially, their argument boils down to the observation that while Cap jumped out of a fairly stable plane in Winter Soldier, his aircraft in The First Avenger was hurtling towards the ground at a tremendous speed. Basic physics therefore dictate that he’d hit the water with a much greater impact in the latter case.
Though we don’t expect this argument to put an end to the debate once and for all, it must be said that the ScreenRant piece makes a pretty solid case. Of course, we all know that the real reason Cap stayed in the plane was to allow for his revival in 2012, setting up a character arc that eventually culminated in Steve returning to the past in Avengers: Endgame. We’ll leave it to you to decide if the First Avenger’s entire journey was worth one potential lapse in logic.
