‘Avengers: Endgame’ theory suggests Marvel hid a big spoiler in plain sight

Marvel and Disney have so far released just two Avengers: Endgame clips, including the first trailer for the movie and the TV commercial that was aired during Super Bowl LIII a few days ago. While the second video is so much shorter than the main trailer, it does pack a ton of scenes into a tight space, including one that fans believe Marvel may have altered in an effort to keep a key plot detail secret. Fans, of course, have already tried to explain what happens in that scene and why Marvel was looking to obfuscate it in trailers.

Marvel is known to alter scenes used for promotional purposes in order to keep certain things secret, and the company may have pulled the same trick in the following scene:

Image source: Marvel

See that big gap there? Fans believe that there’s one character missing in the scene above, and they think Marvel intentionally deleted him so as not to spoil any details about the film. But in doing so, it turns out Marvel may have ended up giving us an even bigger spoiler. Who might that character be? Reddit user MightyMary007 thinks that it’s Doctor Strange, who may have traveled to the future not just to observe events but also to interfere with them and make sure that certain things happen in a very specific way:

Image source: Reddit

The theory also notes something we’ve discussed before when looking at what happened in Infinity War, that Doctor Strange could not have died for good after the snap. That’s because he couldn’t have seen the future beyond his death, something we learned from the Ancient One in the Doctor Strange movie.

“What if he programmed the Time Stone to return him to Titan every time he died/failed in a possible future, which would explain the twitchy poses Mantis noticed as he ‘viewed time,’” the Redditor wonders. “Perhaps using Time Vortexes in the Quantum Realm is a huge misdirect. Maybe Doctor Strange travels in time, saves the day, then returns to his own timeline to die so an alternate version of himself can live without paradox.”

This is just a fan theory, and we could always discover that Marvel hasn’t altered that particular shot in any way. Or, if it did, Strange isn’t the only character that might have been digitally removed to prevent spoilers. We’ll have to wait until April 26th when Endgame premieres to find out.

I will say that if indeed Strange is in that shot, then Marvel had no choice but to edit him out. I’ll also agree that Strange will probably influence events in the future and in the past in order to create the only timeline that lets them defeat Thanos before the infamous snap. But the Quantum Realm can’t be just a misdirect, as Marvel has spent plenty of time focusing on the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man movies, and we already know it’ll be further explored in other MCU films.