Countless continuity errors have haunted the MCU over the last 15 years, but you usually have to be an incredibly attentive Marvel nerd in order to spot them. That’s not the case with the franchise’s most glaringly obvious timeline mistake, though, which was proudly proclaimed in large letters at the beginning of a major movie.
Yes, Spider-Man: Homecoming kicks off with a flashback to the aftermath of The Avengers, in which Vulture and his team are sorting through the wreckage caused by the Chitauri invasion. Once things skip forward to the present day, the caption reads “8 Years Later.” This has always been a truly perplexing goof and you don’t have to be a hardcore Marvel expert to see why. The Avengers released, and is set, in 2012 while Homecoming was only released in 2017, and takes place slightly earlier in 2016.
Naturally, fans wasted no time in noticing the embarrassing error and Marvel quickly waved it away as a temporal glitch that we shouldn’t take as canon. For years there, we had no real reason behind the mistake, but now at last we do. And we know exactly whose fault it was.
Marvel Studios: The Marvel Cinematic Universe — An Official Timeline, a reference book with Kevin Feige’s stamp of approval, is the first time a thorough breakdown of the entirety of MCU continuity has been released. The book is narrated by Miss Minutes who occasionally interjects to explain timeline errors and, yes, that includes the Homecoming debacle.
“Hi again!” Miss Minutes says on the matter. “Adrian Toomes says the Battle of New York was 8 years ago, but that event was only 4 years prior. This one’s a real head scratcher for us — I reckon an analyst misplaced a case file.”
So, there you go, it seems that good old-fashioned poor filing is the reason behind this strange time slip. Going by Miss Minutes’ words, at some point the TVA intervened in the Battle of New York and by pruning some branched timeline they created a peculiar side-effect where Toomes believes he’s four years older than he is.
We need a What If…? episode to clear this up ASAP.
