We seriously need to consider that Doctor Strange may have seen the future of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. Given the most recent update from trusted industry insider Alex Perez, Marvel Studios has had a plan from early on in the multiverse saga for how they were going to treat what’s been going on in the MCU, and the reason
the impetus for Avengers: Secret Wars. Now that we’re approaching the end of that plan and with this latest update, it really recontextualizes key moments even throughout the Infinity Saga, including during Infinity War when Doctor Strange looked forward to see all possible outcomes and revealed he saw 14,605,000. We’re going to break down why this is so important, and when Doctor Strange referenced only one where they win, he may have been talking about the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and not the end of Avengers: Endgame.
If you could grab the subscribe button, we do daily Marvel content at the channel. That’s all we do. Thanks to everyone who’s been helping grow the channel and subscribing recently. And if you haven’t already, I would just kindly invite you to do so. It’s the number one thing you can do to support the channel. Plus, it’ll enter you for the giveaways if you want. Stick around at the end of the video. We get into all the giveaway stuff again there. OK, so let’s start with the latest reveal in case you missed yesterday’s video. This is from Alex Perez over at the Cosmic Circus, and he indicated in his latest update that Marvel Studios may have changed from Kang to Doom.
but that the plan for the Multiverse Saga has always been the same. That the Infinity Saga and Multiverse Saga were the 14 millionth, six hundred and fifth try of a time loop that had been running over and over again. And he also indicated He Who Remains wasn’t lying. That no matter what happens, no matter what different actions the Avengers take to try to intercede, it always ends the same way. Multiversal War, He Who Remains, a lie.
Sacred Timeline TVA. Okay, so this is where things get kind of spicy. Let’s cut back to that scene in Infinity War and look at Dr. Strange’s exact quote. He says he looks forward in time to, quote, “view alternate futures to see all, not some, all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.” He then doesn’t qualify that he didn’t finish. He simply states that he saw 14,605,000 when Star-Lord asks how many he saw. A finite number, not an infinite number of possible outcomes.
a finite number of possible outcomes. And not only a finite number of possible outcomes, but 14,604 of the 14,605 of them they lose? What is Dr. Strange really referring to here? Because clearly we see in 838 during Multiverse of Madness that a different combination of heroes—granted, that may have been a little more powerful with Professor X and Black Bolt on the team.
who were able to take out Thanos on Titan. So I don’t believe that these 14,604,000 combinations didn’t have the Avengers at least winning against Thanos in some kind of way. I think the 14,605,000 outcomes he saw were that no matter what they did, they would always be right back here fighting Thanos again and living through this timeline because it was an infinite loop. And the one that he’s referring to where they actually win is the one where they now break the loop. Now that doesn’t mean the events of Avengers: Endgame
don’t mean anything. There are two specific events now in Avengers: Endgame that might even mean more. The first of which is them traveling back in time to try to get the Infinity Stones. If they don’t do that, presumably the Loki in the lobby of the Avengers Tower that’s able to grab the Tesseract
doesn’t go on to become Loki, God of Stories, where he is now, and ultimately it’s because of him that the time loom has been broken, there is no circular sacred timeline, and he is holding together an infinitely branched world tree, allowing it to grow. Now, ultimately it won’t be enough. That’s the whole conflict of Avengers: Secret Wars. We’re going to get to that. But obviously the second huge moment in Avengers: Endgame that still needs to mean something is Tony Stark snapping, and that is the moment that Doctor Strange holds up
There’s only one way for us to win. But maybe it didn’t mean specifically because he snaps and beats Thanos there. Maybe it’s because of what the Russos have said about Tony’s death being tied into why in the world
Doctor Doom looks like our Tony Stark. There’s a reason there; they are tied together. The Rousseaus have admitted that, and no matter how they’re connected, if they’re tied together, it means that Tony Stark had to die. Maybe his dying was more important to lead to these moments than even defeating Thanos. And what’s even crazier at the bottom of this theory is the fact that Doctor Doom is what Doctor Strange may have seen in the future. Thinking he needs to preserve Tony Stark’s life may have been because of what he was seeing.
There was a Doctor Doom who looked exactly like Tony Stark, and in the moment and under immense stress, Doctor Strange may have seen a face that looked like Tony Stark’s and still thought he was the key to us winning. Now, as I was working on this theory, I had to reconcile that after Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness admits, with Wong and America Chavez sitting at the table, that they don’t know much about the multiverse, that it’s still a rather unknown thing to him.
But that wouldn’t be necessary in this instance, because he would have seen the 616 timeline playing over and over again, their own timeline. He wouldn’t have needed knowledge of everything across the multiverse to continually travel in a circle just on the 616, his own timeline. The same way that Tony Stark’s time travel was not multiversal, it was just up and down the 616 timeline.
Now it’s been years since we’ve talked about Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame in any sort of meaningful and theoretical way the way we are during this video, and it feels pretty necessary to bring up that even back then I was pretty vocal, a little upset about how they handled time travel during Avengers: Endgame. In one sense they set up one set of rules and said this is how time travel works, but then saying that you could go back and replace the Infinity Stones right in the exact place that you took them doesn’t undo the future it would have created. That’s the whole point.
by the rules that they set. So they sort of set their own rules and then broke them. And the fact that they weren’t on the same page about what actually happened with Steve Rogers—that also was a little disconcerting. But look, if you want to poke plot holes in things, you can. And overall, I think the Russos did an excellent job of not overexplaining things. They could have gotten bogged down in it and created even more plot holes. Tony Stark creating time travel, a pretty simple process. Could have been a 15-minute scene.
Instead, it was a couple of minutes. And the exact same thing with them creating the Stark tech gauntlet, like let’s not spend any time on this. He creates the gauntlet. How did he do it? He’s Tony Stark. It’s a great way to avoid them creating plot holes where they don’t need them. And again, they couldn’t even keep it together with time travel rules in the same movie. And so this is going to be a little tricky, I think, to sort of get on the same page with Loki season one, Loki season two, and how they’ve treated the multiverse up until now. And you have to imagine
The original writer, Michael Waldron, on the first sort of script for Avengers: Sequel Wars, he’s at least got to be consulted in some way because he was the one sort of holding this all together, who wrote Multiversal Madness, who was really coming up with some of the main multiversal rules, but they’ve also still got the two writers from Loki as well to consult. And so I think if Marvel Studios truly had this plan that Alex was talking about and it was like, no matter who the villain is, the whole thing is we’ve been doing this over and over again for 14,605 times.
Avengers: Secret Wars is going to mean something now because when that conflict has finally been resolved and however the multiverse is shaped, we will be in completely brand new uncharted territory, a soft reboot in-world for a continuity that has never been able to grow and change. And in a meta sense, that’s what will make Avengers: Secret Wars mean even more. But you guys let me know all your thoughts down below, as I’m sure many of you will. And you know, we’ve basically entered full-on theory season. And when it gets to theory season, here’s the thing.
Not everyone is always going to agree with theories. There are going to be ways to argue things and debunk them. But man, I really try to stick just to what’s in the canon and not try to reference comics or try to do, you know, two or three degrees of separation on my logic, just imagining, well, this happens. And then if this happens, that happens. I stick to what’s in the canon, what they’ve put on screen, and specifically with the dialogue they choose. Maybe sometimes I’m not right. It’s totally cool. They’re just theories. Try to remember that.
