As exciting as all the time travel stuff was, one thing fans couldn’t wait to see in Avengers: Endgame was the reunion of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. The duo had a terrible split in Captain America: Civil War and were kept apart in Avengers: Infinity War. So, this was the first time we were to see the two friends together in three years.
As it happened, it was like all was forgotten when they finally reunited, after Stark was rescued from space by Captain Marvel near the beginning of the movie. But, though it was three for us, how many years had it been since Iron Man and Cap had seen each other within the MCU?
This was a question the filmmakers debated on Endgame‘s audio commentary. Due to the lengthy passage of time in the film, however, even the combined efforts of the Russos and writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus couldn’t provide a definitive answer, with the group settling on somewhere between six and eight years.“We’ll let someone else figure that out,” Joe Russo commented
What the team do know about is the emotional resonance of the reunion and the characters’ motivations in the scene where Tony hands Cap back his shield.
Markus explained:
“Well they finally need each other again,And this is, I think, the best way that Tony can apologize. Or that he knows how to apologize…It’s hard to believe we did an entire Avengers movie without that thing.”
However long it was for them, Joe Russo believes that the three-year wait the audience had contributed to how powerful the moment of their reconciliation is.
“That’s the value I think in serialized storytelling and telling a mosaic like this, is that you…if you make choices that take years to resolve, the audience feels that. Because they too have waited years for this to resolve. And it has been since 2016 since these characters have had a pleasant scene between each other.“
You can’t blame the filmmakers for not being able to get Endgame‘s timeline straight. What with all the movies in the MCU, the franchise’s sequence of events is all over the place. Just look at Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s suggestion that Peter Parker is still 16 years old in 2024.
Tell us, though, how emotional did you get when Tony and Steve reconciled in Avengers: Endgame? Let it all out in the comments section down below.
