There are a lot more answers still to come...
If you've seen
Avengers: Endgame, then you've probably got some questions.
We certainly did, and we attempted to answer as many of them as possible in
our breakdown of the movie's ending(s), but it turns out there were even more questions posed by Endgame's resolution than we'd realised.
Speaking to
Entertainment Weekly, the movie's directors Joe and Anthony Russo were asked some questions about Endgame's ending, and they were being... let us say, extremely coy about some of the details.
You'd think that with the movie being out and all, there'd be no need for any more secrecy, but it may be because some of the stuff being discussed here actually has implications for the future of the MCU.
When asked if Captain America going back in time and deciding to stay there and live his life, wouldn't that cause a new branching timeline to develop, explicitly going against the warning of Tilda Swinton's Ancient One, it turns out that yep, he did indeed create that new branch:
"If Cap were to go back into the past and live there, he would create a branched reality," Joe Russo explained. "The question then becomes, how is he back in this reality to give the shield away?"
Joe and Anthony both smile at the question-answering-the-question, before Joe continued:
"Interesting question, right? Maybe there’s a story there. There's a lot of layers built into this movie and we spent three years thinking through it, so it’s fun to talk about it and hopefully fill in holes for people so they understand what we’re thinking."
So... is this not the end of Captain America? We reckoned that Endgame gave him a pretty fantastic send-off, but it might not be as simple as that, as it continues with how Bucky and Sam react to Steve going back in time in the first place.
"Especially when he says goodbye," Joe explained. "He says, 'I'll miss you.' Clearly he knows something. [And] Sam doesn’t know something."
That would seem to imply that Bucky already knows that he's saying goodbye to Steve, perhaps because they've already crossed paths in the past, and is why he sends Sam over to say his goodbyes on the bench, because Bucky already got his years earlier.
And, last one (for now), when Steve asks Sam how it feels to be holding the Captain America shield, their back and forth feels like it was heavy with meaning: "Like it’s someone else's." "It isn't."
Now, if you remember, Captain's shield was pretty much destroyed by Thanos in the Endgame, so there is a chance that this shield was actually made for Sam. Why exactly was it made for this timeline's Sam? The Russo Brothers admit it is an understandable question, but they're not revealing their hand on this one yet.
Considering one of the headlining shows of Disney's new streaming platform will be titled Falcon & The Winter Solider, we're sure we'll get some more concrete answers before too long.
