Another Head-Turning Error Was Just Discovered In Endgame
Continuity in Avengers: Endgame could get a little confusing... even if you were in charge of decorating the sets.
A sharp-eyed fan has pointed out a slight inconsistency when the Avengers travel back to 2012 to secure the Mind Stone from Loki — one you're only likely to notice if you have every detail of The Avengers committed to memory. (via We Got This Covered)
In case you need a quick refresher: Endgame's second act sees different teams of Avengers traveling to different periods in the past, in an attempt to snatch all six Infinity Stones before the Mad Titan Thanos can get his grimy, purple mitts on them. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Scott Lang, and Bruce Banner (AKA Professor Hulk) are tasked with returning to 2012 and the Battle of New York, where they know that three can be found: the Time Stone (which is in the possession of the Ancient One, since Doctor Strange hasn't yet made her acquaintance), the Mind Stone (which is housed in Loki's scepter as he leads the Chitauri attack on New York), and the Space Stone (AKA the Tesseract, also in the trickster god's possession).
Banner is able to convince the Ancient One to pony up the Time Stone, but grabbing the Mind Stone proves to be a great deal trickier. After a brawl in Stark Tower, Loki is initially secured, and the stone is in the custody of the Avengers (the time traveling ones, not their 2012 counterparts). But as they and a phalanx of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are preparing to transport the trickster god into the waiting arms of authorities via elevator, it becomes apparent that one of the heroes will have to take the stairs: the 2012 version of the Hulk, whose weight is too much for the elevator to handle.
Everything goes pear-shaped at this point; the Hulk loses his mind, chaos ensues, Loki grabs the Space Stone and vanishes. But what we'd like to call your attention to is the interior of that elevator, because when the time-traveling Avengers take a ride in it, it looks a heck of a lot different than it did the first time they (and we) saw it.
See for yourself: here's the Stark Tower elevator as we saw it in 2012's The Avengers:
Disney / Marvel
And here is (ostensibly) the same elevator, with all of our heroes aboard, in Avengers: Endgame:
Disney / Marvel
We never realized that one of the lesser-known effects of time travel involved slight changes to the decor of your target destination. You'll notice that the rest of the set dressing — including the stand with its lamps and decorative art piece to the left of the elevator — is spot on. The interior of the elevator, though, is plainly not even in the ballpark, and in Endgame, its doors are a lighter shade than they were in Avengers, as well.
We know what you're thinking: the hardworking folks behind Avengers: Endgame's set design deserve a break here. After all, they were tasked not only with giving a distinct look and feel to a film that would become the biggest of all time, but also with painstakingly replicating sets from previous movies, ones which they almost certainly didn't even work on. How could they possibly have been expected to nail every last little detail?
Well, realistically, they couldn't have been. But there's a flip side to that argument: obviously, The Avengers was used as a reference when staging this scene. If it hadn't been, the rest of the decor in the shot wouldn't have matched up, and it's highly unlikely that that table, those lamps, and that sculpture had been sitting in a closet somewhere on Disney's lot since The Avengers completed filming, just waiting to be dragged out and used in another scene.
No, those props almost certainly had to be recreated for Endgame — and if that detail of the old Stark Tower set was subject to scrutiny when the flick's crew was building the sets for the Battle of New York scenes, then all of them were (even that wall-mounted light to the right of the elevator door is in the right place). So, what's up with the elevator? Why go to the trouble of placing all of the props just so if you're going to just say "the heck with it" and use a completely different design for the elevator's interior and door? Did they think nobody would ever notice?
We'd like to propose an in-universe explanation. What if, in order to travel back in time, you must necessarily travel to a different timeline? What if the Avengers didn't travel back to their Battle of New York, but an ever-so-slightly different, alternate Battle of New York? Heck, we know that there are infinite alternate universes; it could even be that the aesthetic of Tony Stark's elevator was literally the only difference between the two timelines.
We like this explanation, because maintaining continuity with the entire rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Endgame must have been the ultimate logistical nightmare. There are probably a million other tiny errors like this just waiting to be discovered, and we just explained every last one of them in one fell swoop. The guys and gals who toil away behind the scenes of the MCU work so hard to bring us our favorite movies, and you know what? It was the least we could do.