Marvel Risks Making Endgame"s Cruelest Lie Even Worse In 2023

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Summary

The trailer for What If...? season 2 suggests that Captain America was successful in removing the Time Stone from Thanos, potentially preventing the Snap and undermining the stakes of Avengers: Infinity War.
If this outcome is true, the MCU will have to find a way to maintain the gravity of the Battle of Wakanda and Doctor Strange's lie in order to avoid downplaying the hopelessness of the fight.
The MCU has previously downplayed the importance of the Infinity Stones in Loki and Thor: Love and Thunder, signaling a shift in focus towards the Multiverse Saga and diminishing Thanos as a formidable villain.

Marvel's What If...? season 2 is Marvel's final release in 2023, and one fleeting scene that features in the trailer seems to worsen one of the cruelest lies from Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War. The ripple effects of MCU Phase 3's climactic Avengers movies have persisted throughout Phases 4 and 5, with the effects of Thanos' Snap being foremost among them. While the Avengers emerged victorious as a result of their efforts, there were casualties among the team that, according to Doctor Strange, could not have been avoided in the MCU timeline. Except it appears that they could, after all.
After peering into 14,000,605 different timelines, Strange assured Stark that there was only one future in which Thanos would be defeated by the Avengers. Specifically, the one in which Natasha Romanoff and Tony Stark lost their lives after half of the universe lost theirs (before being Blipped back). Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, however, proved that this was a falsehood, as Earth-838's Doctor Strange succeeded in defeating Thanos through using the Darkhold. While this led to an Incursion that would justify Earth-616's Doctor Strange omitting that possibility, What If...? season 2 revealed that there may have been yet another, less destructive, route to success.
Captain America's Fight With Thanos Makes Doctor Strange's Endgame Lie Bigger

Doctor Strange - who was revealed to have never divulged details about the millions of possible futures in which the Avengers succeeded in Ant-Man's book, Look Out for the Little Guy! - can be forgiven for skipping over futures in which an entire universe would have been destroyed as a result. A scene in What If...? season 2, however, seems to show Captain America successfully removing the Time Stone from Thanos' Infinity Gauntlet in the Battle of Wakanda. Assuming this is not followed by Thanos simply reinserting the Infinity Stone, it can be assumed that Cap's success would have prevented the Snap entirely.

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