Spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming.

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Spider-Man: Homecoming brings the web-crawler officially into the MCU fold, but does it break the fabric of the shared universe in the process? After two iterations existing totally on his own, Peter Parker is now in a world of Avengers, Defenders, Gods and Sorcerers. And Jon Watts has an awful lot of fun with this, bringing in Tony Stark as a substitute father figure and having Spidey's main drive be to join Earth's Mightiest Heroes. However, while the film delights in its MCU connections, upon deeper inspection it actually destroys the timeline.

On a fundamental level, the Marvel timeline is really rather simple. Phase 1 is a bit of a jumble, with movies happening concurrently (we'll explain shortly), but from The Avengers - released and set in 2012 - onwards they moved into being set at the time of release unless otherwise stated. Of course, when you add in period-set content like Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter, flashbacks, several forms of television narrative (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. unfolds in real-time and reacts to in-movie events) and even its own run of comics, things get a little more complicated. Thankfully, Marvel has a massive timeline scroll themselves to keep track of it, and fans have made their own version to keep the rest of us updated.

But there's now a big, big problem.

  • The Spider-Man: Homecoming Plot Hole (This Page)

Spider-Man: Homecoming's Plot Hole

With all that aforementioned context considered, we'd expect Spider-Man's solo debut to be set in Summer-Fall 2016; it details Peter Parker's life in the months after Captain America: Civil War and culminates in the sub-titular high-school dance. But that's not quite right. Homecoming opens with a prologue in the aftermath of The Avengers, with Adrian Toomes and his clean-up crew dealing with the devastation from The Battle of New York. After they're pushed out by Damage Control and vow to change to reflect the new world, we jump forward to Toomes' fully-fledged crime empire and completed Vulture suit ahead of the movie's main story. According to a title card, this is "Eight Years Later".

Those of you keeping track of dates will have already noticed that this creates something of a problem; The Avengers is accepted as being set in 2012, which would put Homecoming as occurring in 2020, three years on from release and four after the accepted canon. That, or we've been misinformed and the team-up actually took place in 2008. Either way, the timeline's broke - and it gets more complicated the deeper you go.

Is this just a simple mistake, the sign of a bigger shift in Marvel Studios, or something more narratively pertinent? Let's find out.

Related: Marvel Studios Will Release Official MCU Timeline To Address Issues

For the sake of brevity, we're going to mostly try and keep just to details in the films, but a note on some of the other MCU mediums as several provide concrete dates that back up Homecoming being a problem; Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is explictly in real-time and ties into most of the Earth-set movies post-Avengers, while fictional news network WHIH also locks movies into their release window. That said, for our eventual solution we'll need to ignore these, although will still elaborate on specifics at the suitable points.

Marvel Comics Timeline

The Current MCU Timeline Explained

Before we go through the looking glass, let's first get everyone on the same page in regards to the accepted timeline.

Phase 1 was pretty much made up as it unfolded and the in-universe flow reflects this. You have Iron Man, then a year later in movie time Iron Man 2, which due to various easter eggs is also set in the same week as The Incredible Hulk and Thor. This was all retconned to have the first film in 2010 and "Fury's Big Week" happening in 2011, with Cap's defrosting in the present day bookends of The First Avenger occurring in 2012 ahead of The Avengers that same year. Complicated, but clearly placing the team-up provided a neat baseline going forward.

Phase 2 normalized things a little, introducing the idea of events simply unfolding in real-time unless there were specific exceptions. And looking at each movie we can find that it does match up: Iron Man 3 was set six months after The Avengers to account for Christmas, backed up by Killian saying it's thirteen years since his offer to Tony Stark from New Year's Eve 1999 (this also means we can't move The Avengers from 2012); Thor: The Dark World was set in release month November 2013, evidenced by a background calendar; both Guardians of the Galaxy and Vol. 2 are set in 2014 based on the date subtitles (the prologues occur in 1988 and 1980, then jump forward 26 and 34 years respectively); The Winter Soldier doesn't have any exact dating but is said to come two years after The Avengers (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. corroborates this); Avengers: Age of Ultron is the previous summer to Captain America: Civil War, which we know is two years after The Winter Soldier as Sam Wilson says they've been hunting Bucky for that long; and Ant-Man follows Avengers 2 directly. There's also Doctor Strange running through some of this, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Timeline specifics going forward are unclear, but we have been told that Infinity War takes place four years after Guardians 2, putting it in release year 2018. That's all pretty easy to follow and rather tight, although recently we've begun to struggle when looking at minutiae.

Phase 3's Previous Plot Holes

Paul Bettany as Vision wearing a sweater in Captain America: Civil War

After things worked pretty neatly for a few years, with the expanding of Phase 3 cracks have started to emerge. The first indication that something wasn't lining up came in Civil War. When discussing the Sokovia Accords, Vision stated: "In the eight years since Mr. Stark announced himself as Iron Man, the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially". While it was indeed eight years in real time since Iron Man was released, it was only six since the events in the movie world - a minor but pretty confusing line drop.

Doctor Strange further confused things - not in any explicit way but by simply not existing in any coherent time space. It shunned the name drop from The Winter Soldier by clearly starting post-Age of Ultron, and had a very unclear passage of time. Ignoring all potential easter eggs linking it to other films and instead using the time given on his watch and the post-credits scene being set during Thor: Ragnarok, we can conclude it's set across 2016 and early 2017. This works fine enough, but the confusion indicated a lack of consideration.

Then came Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which despite mostly avoiding timeline considerations by coming so close to the original and being set in an otherwise uninhabited wing of the MCU still had problems; the lone Earth-set moment showing Ego's expansion directly clashed with everything else going on at the time - it's set between The Winter Soldier and Age of Ultron.

Now we have Homecoming, which not only introduces its own plot hole but directly contradicts the one from Civil War; The Avengers is explicitly two years after Iron Man, yet both events are said to have happened eight years prior to 2016. This one's particularly hard to excuse as there's not even a real world reasoning for the confusion. It definitely seems like oversight, but if that's the case, what's happened to Marvel?

Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark in The Incredible Hulk

The Dark Truth: Marvel Doesn't Care About Micro-Continuity

Since the very early days of Phase 1, the MCU's mantra has been that "everything is connected". And it obviously is, but increasingly this is only true on a macro scale. If you look at the broad scope you have this amazing tapestry of sixteen movies, ever more TV shows and so much more content that all interlocks. Dig even remotely deeper and try to have things match-up, though, and it gets messy.

This was to a degree inherent from the start, with The Incredible Hulk teasing Tony Stark's involvement with S.H.I.E.L.D. despite the subsequent-but-narratively-concurrent Iron Man 2 showing him kicked out of the Avenger Initiative. However, when these problems arose Marvel did a good job of addressing any major conflicts - that Iron Man flub was explained as a trick in Marvel One-Shot The Consultant. As we've gone on, though, mistakes appear more often and are just ignored.

A big part of this has to be the sheer size and breadth of content. The MCU already runs a week long and that's only going to increase in the coming years. Already the universe has become unwieldy, to the point where maintaining a continuity to an anal degree is simply an untenable position. Instead, they focus on the big picture and let fans course correct everything else in their headcanon.

Sometimes this gets too muddled. One of the coolest easter eggs in Thor was the Infinity Gauntlet in Odin's Vault, subtly laying cues for Infinity War a year before Thanos was even introduced. However, when Age of Ultron rolled around and showed the Mad Titan getting his mitts on the golden glove it was clearly in a different location, something later confirmed by Kevin Feige, who handwaved an explanation of their being two gauntlets. The harsh truth is that they've simply retconned the Thor easter egg, making it a replica or - worse - just pretending it doesn't exist. The message of all this is that Marvel is happy to override previous plot elements if it helps the new stories at hand. Indeed, now we're hearing that James Gunn may have to "break" continuity to do his desired story for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Two Infinity Gauntlets in Marvel Cinematic Universe

If this feels like a direct contradiction of the shared universe ethos that's because it is, although it's not inherently ruinous. If in each case it helps the individual movie work, then this should, of course, be allowed and frankly not fretted about. That said, some consideration of maintaining the continuity should be made, espcially when it's not got any real advantage to be broken.

That's what makes all this date altering so strange. It wouldn't make any real difference to Homecoming if Toomes spent the correct four years building up his alien weapons business instead of eight, and neither does it have any bearing on how we view Peter Parker's obsession with The Avengers. It's particularly remarkable given that eight is literally the only number of years that doesn't have a clear solution; it's four years since The Avengers in-universe, five in real time, six since Iron Man in-universe, seven since that year in the real wor;d, and nine since the MCU started. Eight years is the only time measurement that isn't some sort of franchise anniversary.

Now, some will surely feel this is a result of Homecoming being a Sony production and them - either by oversight or an attempt to shift the continuity ahead of their "same reality" shared universe - making an unwanted change but that's far too conspiratory; Marvel's had a major creative hand in the film, going to great extents to ensure the new Peter Parker gels perfectly in the canon so that is just unlikely. The only logical explanation is that it was a script placeholder that got carried over into the finished film, almost as proof that, while the MCU has a pretty solid continuous canon, you probably shouldn't try and look too deeply into it.

However, we may just have found a solution. And it's a doozy.

Theory: Are Marvel Shifting The Timeline?

While it doesn't account for Vision's Civil War snafu, there is actually a way to address this within the universe, it just requires a bit of shifting of some other movies on the accepted timeline. Phase 1, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor 2 and Guardians are all locked in place by aforementioned date references, and we know the start of Doctor Strange is in 2016. However, the other movies - Winter Soldier, Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Civil War and Homecoming - all date themselves only in reference to each other (this is where we have to ignore S.H.I.E.L.D. and WHIH). This means that we can shift them as a block along the timeline; so, if Homecoming is in 2020, then so is Civil War, with Avengers 2 and Ant-Man in 2019 and The Winter Soldier in 2018. Doctor Strange then starts in 2016 and runs up to 2020, leaving Stephen Strange training for a long but not unbelievable period of time. In turn, we have to push Infinity War up to 2021 at the earliest.

Natural anachronisms that come from setting movies in the near-future aside, this does sort of work. In fact, this was a possibility that was first raised with Doctor Strange which likewise stretched the timeline without consideration for the other films. Back then we dismissed it due to it clashing with Thor: Ragnarok, but as we're now saying every post-The Dark World Earth-set film is shifted it can work.

This seems weird now, but considering how much is set to go down in the MCU over the next few years it could actually help it make a little more sense. If everything continues unfolding in real-time, then Peter Parker will be well out of high school by the time of Homecoming 2, something Sony and Marvel explicitly don't want. Instead, you can have Ragnarok and Infinity War all occur in a tight timeframe, allowing the sequel to be set in 2021 and a third film in 2022 (by which point the timeline won't be as out of step). It's putting onus on Spider-Man over all others, but as 2019's Avengers 4 is wrapping up the current arc and Spidey is key going forward making sure his story makes sense is a high priority.

However, this does create bigger narrative problems. In the five years between 2013 and 2018 basically nothing happens in-universe; Captain America spends far too long adapting to the modern world before Bucky steps in and we overall lose the momentum that powers Civil War (and the whole universe). There's also the Stark Expo 2018 posters spotted on Homecoming's set - we don't know where they are in the movie at the time of writing, but that suggests it's meant to be 2016/2017. It further creates a much bigger gap between Guardians 2 and their Avengers team-up than we've been previously told. And, again, this is flagrantly ignoring Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which explicitly puts the films in the mid-2010s

That's a lot of issues that make it questionable - so why even do it? Well, we think it could all be because of a single easter egg.

Is Homecoming Adjusting Because Of Iron Man 2?

Yes, there is one canonical consideration that could have had an influence. Just weeks before Homecoming came out, Tom Holland confirmed a long-standing fan theory that the kid Tony Stark came across at the Stark Expo wearing an Iron Man mask and immitating Shellhead was actually a young Peter Parker. That's really rather cool, but creates a problem; per Iron Man 2 being set in 2011 and Peter being fifteen in Homecoming, if the latter film was set in 2016 as expected that makes this kid ten years old. He's clearly much younger than that - we'd reckon six or so - which reveals the retconned cameo as opportunisitc. But having the timeline stretched swiftly accounts for it; if Peter's six in 2011, he would be fifteen in 2020.

This feels particularly pertinent as, in his explanation of the easter egg, Holland said "I literally had a conversation with Kevin Feige only 20 minutes ago. Maybe I've just done a big, old spoiler, but it's out there now." That implies there is some greater purpose to it, which this seeming plot hole would fit in with. If that's the case, then it would seem the timeline shift theory above is the true explanation and Spidey has secretly rejigged the entire MCU canon.

Of course, that's the epitome of this "for the now" approach to wider continuity discussed earlier; they've messed up the entire timeline to address a slight easter egg just because it was announced recently while giving no consideration to backcatalogue of films (or the TV show's besides). It's not much more reasonable than them simply not realizing the mistake in the first place.

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Maybe it's time to just accept that the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline is broken beyond repair and just enjoy the movies for what they are? Heartbreaking as it may be after nine years of continuity investment, it's the only way to truly make sense of all this.

Next: Spider-Man in the MCU: The Marvel/Sony Deal Explained

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