The Avengers: Endgame trailer has been out for three Earth days, and it has already broken YouTube records. And after millions of views in a matter of hours, some fans have begun putting together some of the clues in this trailer to formulate some pretty compelling theories.
So, we've already talked about Captain America's hair and style choices, but what about that tricky final shot of the trailer, which shows Scott Lang, who got lost in the Quantum Realm when the Thanos Snap happened?
The final seconds of the trailer show Ant-Man pulling up to the Avengers HQ in his old van that contains the machine he used to travel to the Quantum Realm. Captain America and Black Widow are watching security footage of of Lang yelling at the security camera reminding them who he is.
"Is this an old message?" Cap asks.
"That's the front door," Black Widow responds.
The trailer implies that Cap is asking if this is an old message because Lang is believed to have died in the Thanos Snap. But what if the footage is actually old because Lang traveled into the past?
As we know, the Quantum Realm opens up a number of possibilities for time travel, which has introduced one of the most popular fan theories about how Avengers: Endgame could go into the past to reverse the Thanos Snap.
One fan theory video points out that the top left corner indicates that Scott Lang yelling into the security camera is actually archived footage from 1983. The front door of the Avengers HQ also looks overgrown and different from how it looks in present time.
So, if Lang used the Quantum Realm to travel into the past, how'd he get his van and the machine into the past, when those were left behind when he traveled during the post-credit scene of Ant-Man and The Wasp? As this fan theory notes, it's possible that he ends up traveling to the future, where he finds the van, tracks down his daughter (now an adult scientist), who helps him use the machine to send it back into the past. But he overshoots his mark, and he tries to track down members of S.H.I.E.L.D—or perhaps Howard Stark, who was alive at the time and played by John Slattery, who has reportedly been seen on set—to help him get to the right time.
Or perhaps that's one jump of many into the past before Lang gets it right. If we want to try to merge this theory with the Captain America hair theory, it's possible that Black Widow and Cap come across this archived footage during the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Of course, the Russo brothers have been known to put misdirection into trailers, and we might not know anything until the movie is actually out in May.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
