While it’s easily one of the most enjoyable installments in the MCU, Avengers: Endgame is anything but straightforward. Filled with time travel, space aliens, doppelgangers from the past, and a whole mess of magic space rocks, there are plenty of moments in the film that are simply confusing. Fortunately, if there’s any part of the movie that makes you scratch your head, just wait five minutes. Chances are good someone involved in the production will give an interview that attempts to straighten it all out.
Case in point, sibling filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo got candid with Business Insider about the Endgame scene featuring a past version of the otherwise dead Norse God Loki. While Iron Man, Ant-Man, Professor Hulk, and Captain America return to New York City in 2012 to collect the Tesseract and Loki’s scepter, which held the Space Stone and the Mind Stone, respectively, Loki swiftly grabs the Tesseract and escapes Thor’s custody through a portal. Once he’s gone, that’s pretty much the last anyone sees of Loki in Avengers: Endgame.
So, what went down? Where is Loki now?
According to co-director Joe Russo, Loki is still dead in the core Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline; his capturing of the Space Stone in 2012 doesn’t reverse his Infinity War death at the hands of Thanos. But he is alive in a different pocket of the multiverse. Loki snatching the Stone and beaming away created a unique timeline. That more or less falls in line with the conversation between Professor Hulk and the Ancient One, when the two met to discuss him borrowing the Time Stone. Essentially, Loki’s escape with the Space Stone was significant enough to cause the central timeline to break off into a branched reality.
The filmmaker explained:
“Loki, when he teleports away with the [Space] Stone, would create his own timeline. It gets very complicated, but it would be impossible for [Cap] to rectify the timeline unless he found Loki. The minute that Loki does something as dramatic as take the Space Stone, he creates a branched reality.”
Now, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers did wind up getting their hands on the Space Stone by utilizing the last of their available Pym Particles to travel to 1970, steal the Space Stone from S.H.I.E.L.D., and then snag a few more vials of Particles from Hank Pym’s lab so they could return home again. This allowed them to fulfill their time heist mission and load up their own Infinity Gauntlet in the year 2023 to revive the heroes who were killed at the end of Infinity War.
But that didn’t fix the problem of there being a Loki somewhere out there with the Space Stone he stole in 2012. The final moments of Endgame saw Cap returning all six Infinity Stones to their rightful places and times. And in the case of the Space Stone, he took that one back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. base in 1970, not to New York in 2012. It’s confusing, like Russo mentioned, but the truth of the matter is that taking the Tesseract from and returning it to 1970 doesn’t affect Loki snagging it in 2012, at least not according to the time travel standards by which Endgame operates. Keep watching the rest of the video to hear the Endgame directors confirm what really happened to Loki!
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