Warning the following article contains SPOILERS for not only Avengers Infinity War, but also for Avengers 4.

So this past weekend Avengers: Infinity War was not only released it broke opening weekend records. Not only will it be the biggest film of 2018, it’s the biggest film of the MCU. The culmination of 10 years of a cinematic universe, nothing like this has been done before and Marvel has done it well.

But what does Infinity War mean for the MCU? Where does this all go now after the events of Infinity War? Not only was this a larger than life film, so were the stakes in the story line. The stakes have never been higher for the MCU and with that The Avengers failed. By the end of the film Thanos has not only killed Loki, Heimdallr, and Gamora, he’s also used the Infinity Gauntlet to remove Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Black Panther, Groot, Drax, Star Lord, Nick Fury , Maria Hill and 1/2 of the universe from existence. How do you recover from that? How do you come back and win? And how do you move forward as a cinematic universe and keep raising the stakes like this?

Well the answer is simple, time travel! There have been leaked photos from the set of Avengers 4 that clearly show that the Avengers have time traveled. To where? The moment seems to be the end of of The Avengers when Thor and a captured defeated Loki are about to head back to Asgard. Now I know there are theories of this being a multi-verse version of Tony and what not, but Marvel doesn’t have a multi-verse, that’s a DC thing.

But the photos clearly show Cap in his Avenger’s costume and clean shaven, Tony wearing an outfit that reminds me of the one he was wearing in Infinity War and they are with Ant-Man.  In addition there are other pictures showing Loki and Chris Hemsworth wearing a wig and wearing his Avengers costume.

And it’s not a huge leap to assume they’ve traveled back to this moment to try and steal the Tesseract which contain the space infinity stone. Possibly to destroy it and thus preventing Infinity War from ever happening. It also makes sense because the Tesseract sat in a vault on Asgard until Ragnarok and thus affect nothing else in the MCU time line past the time it was put in said vault. So from a writing stand point this does the least damage to the time line.

But all that aside, whether they are successful or not, what does introducing time travel mean to the MCU? Could this be the “Jump the Shark” moment for them? If not done right it could put a stink on the entire franchise. Time travel is always tricky in movies and never is done without criticism. Also what prevents it from becoming a crutch? If you use it once why not use it again to fix other problems?

Plus there is the issue of the story itself. The stakes were so high that the Avengers actually lost. This leaves a lot of people asking how do you keep raising the stakes after this? Can you raise the stakes any further? If you don’t where do you go?

One possible direction, and this is just speculation on my part, is the merger of the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool into the MCU. We all know at this point that Disney has bought Fox, but they have to wait on using these characters until the deal is finalized. But what if altering the time line by going back in time to defeat Thanos alters more than just the out come of Infinity War? What if it somehow alters things so much the X-Men and the FF are now part of the universe. They’ve done things like this on the Flash (I know it’s DC). Where when Barry goes back in time and returns to the future things are altered with out a large explanation on why. I feel the MCU could pull something like this.

It could help avoid having to redo origin stories we’ve seen multiple times already. Also opening the world up further like that will have people excited for the changes after Avengers four and less likely to complain about odd time travel stories. But this is just a speculation on my part. I’m curious what you think. How would you feel by a twist like this? Do you think time travel is a good idea? Are the MCU days number? Or can they keep going strong for another 10 years?

Let me know in the comments down below. Also don’t forget to check out the latest episode of the podcast for our full review of Infinity War!