Now that we’re done rooting for Avengers: Endgame to crush Avatar at the box office, we can focus on the digital release of the highest-grossing film of all time. Avengers 4 has been available online for a few weeks and the Blu-Ray version just launched a couple of days ago. We’ve been given access to even more commentary and deleted scenes from the movie that are supposed to explain all of its remaining mysteries. Moreover, fans have been able to inspect the digital version of Endgame more closely and discover an incredible Easter egg that we can’t really explain.
Of course, it turns out that’s not the only Endgame Easter egg that you might have missed. There’s a Captain America: The Winter Soldier Easter egg in there too, but it’s buried so deep that you can’t actually see it.
VFX studio Cinesite put out its own Endgame reel that shows several of the special effects developed for the movie. We’re looking at plenty of great scenes featuring our favorite Marvel superheroes, and that’s where this new Easter egg comes from. The video is just four minutes and 33 seconds long, but there’s only one scene that we care about.
It’s this one, via iO9, where we see Tony Stark running inside the SHIELD facility in search of a certain Tesseract that houses the Space Stone:
It turns out that Cinesite put the face of Armin Zola on one of those computers in the background, but it’s something that you most likely can’t even see in a theater, let alone on a TV in your home. I sure didn’t see it, although hearing Zola’s spoken by Howard Stark put a smile on my face.
After all, it’s here that Steve Rogers and Natasha will find the computer version of Armin Zola in Winter Soldier. This Endgame action takes place in the past, in 1970 about two years before Zola’s death. That means the former HYDRA and current SHIELD scientist must have been working on a way to transfer his consciousness to a computer right around that time. That is if he hadn’t done it already.
The nod to the key Captain America scene is quite obvious now that we see Cinesite’s VFX reel. After all, the things that happened in that movie set in motion a chain of events that culminate with Infinity War and Endgame. Yes, everything that happens in the entire Marvel universe does lead to the final two Avengers films in MCU Phase 3, but The Winter Soldier carries some extra weight. After all, this is the first MCU film that the Russo brothers directed, working with the same Marcus-McFeely writing duo who then joined them for Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame.
