This Is How Time Travel Works In The MCU – Comicdoor.com

After watching Avengers Endgame it is very clear that ‘not all time travel is the same, and the time travel in the MCU is even more complicated than in other movies.

James Rhodes (the war machine) had a point, after all! why can’t we just kill baby Thanos and solve the entire problem? The answer is because the MCU’s version of time travel is very different from what we’ve typically seen in other time-travel movies.

Rules Of Time Travel In The MCU [Important]*

Rule no. 1: Changing the past will not change the future.

Rule no. 2: Changing any element in the past will create new timelines.

Rule no. 3: Using the time machine, we can only avoid what could happen in the future.

These are some basic rules of time travel in the MCU, These rules are important to refer to if you want to understand MCU’s time travel. Why to follow these rules? well! all time travel has some rules and the version adopted by MCU has these time travelling rules.

How Time Travel Works In The MCU

Time travel in the MCU is different but very easy to understand if you refer the above rules, and it is very important to understand it because the upcoming movies of MCU like ‘Avengers: the Kang Dynasty’ are going to be on time travel.

So let’s understand time travel with an example:

In the present, Thanos has killed half of the universe using infinity stones and has destroyed those infinity stones so that no one else could use them again to bring back half of the population.

Now, Iron-man created a time machine to go back in past and fix the problem,

Lets’s assume Avengers decided to kill baby thanos, so that he never grows up and kills half of the universe, here’s what will happen if avengers decided to do that:

Avengers goes back in time when Thanos was born and manages to kill the baby Thanos, this will create a new timeline (Rule no. 2) and now we will have 2 different timelines.

Timeline A (the old timeline): Where Thanos killed half of the universe and avengers went back in time to fix it.

Timeline B (the new timeline): Where Avengers from timeline A came and killed baby Thanos.

This way in timeline B Thanos has already died and in this timeline, Thanos will never kill half of the universe because he is already dead, this way the Avengers from timeline A saved the timeline B from Thanos.

And doing this has avoided the future problem of timeline B (Rule no. 3).

But the goal was to save timeline A and the Avengers ended up saving timeline B, in the original timeline (timeline A) still nothing is changed.

And this is why changing the past will not affect the future of the same timeline (Rule no. 1), but it will affect the future of the newly created timeline (rule no. 3).

So this is how the time travel of the MCU works, and this is the reason why Avengers had to go back in time collect all the infinity stones, then get back to their timeline and use the infinity stones to bring back everyone.

But the catch was that Thanos from the other timeline (new timeline) discovered their plan and saw the opportunity to take the infinity stones from the Avengers because avengers had already done the hard work of collecting all the infinity stones.

And then we had the thanos from the new timeline try to kill half of the universe and avengers ended up killing thanos and his army.

Therefore Avengers does not only save their timeline but also the new timeline from where the new Thanos was.