Spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming.

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

On a fundamental level, the Marvel timeline is actually rather unproblematic. Phase 1 is a fleck of a jumble, with movies happening concurrently (we'll explain presently), merely from The Avengers - released and set in 2012 - onwards they moved into being ready at the time of release unless otherwise stated. Of course, when you add together in period-set up content like Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter, flashbacks, several forms of idiot box narrative (Agents of S.H.I.E.50.D. unfolds in real-fourth dimension 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 whorl themselves to go along rails of it, and fans have made their ain version to keep the residue of u.s. updated.

But in that location's now a big, big problem.

Spider-Homo: Homecoming's Plot Pigsty

With all that aforementioned context considered, we'd expect Spider-Man'southward solo debut to be set in Summer-Autumn 2016; information technology details Peter Parker's life in the months after Captain America: Ceremonious State of war and culminates in the sub-titular high-school dance. Just that's non quite right.Homecoming opens with a prologue in the aftermath of The Avengers, with Adrian Toomes and his clean-upward coiffure dealing with the devastation from The Battle of New York. After they're pushed out past Harm Control and vow to modify to reflect the new earth, nosotros jump forward to Toomes' fully-fledged criminal offence empire and completed Vulture suit alee of the picture's primary story. According to a championship 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 gear up in 2012, which would put Homecoming as occurring in 2020, 3 years on from release and iv after the accepted canon. That, or we've been misinformed and the team-upwardly actually took place in 2008. Either way, the timeline'southward bankrupt - and it gets more complicated the deeper yous become.

Is this but a simple mistake, the sign of a bigger shift in Curiosity Studios, or something more narratively pertinent? Permit'south find out.

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

For the sake of brevity, we're going to mostly attempt and keep just to details in the films, but a note on some of the other MCU mediums as several provide physical dates that back up Homecoming being a problem;Agents of Due south.H.I.E.L.D. is explictly in real-time and ties into near 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.

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)Release date: Jul 07, 2017
  • Thor: Ragnarok (2017)Release appointment: Nov 03, 2017
  • Black Panther (2018)Release engagement: February sixteen, 2018
  • Avengers: Infinity War / The Avengers three (2018)Release date: Apr 27, 2018
  • Captain Curiosity (2019)Release engagement: Mar 08, 2019
  • The Avengers iv / Avengers: Endgame (2019)Release appointment: Apr 26, 2019
  • Ant-Man & The Wasp (2018)Release date: Jul 06, 2018

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Alex Leadbeater (1120 Articles Published)

Screen Rant's Managing Editor, Alex Leadbeater has been roofing film online since 2012 and been a permanent fixture of SR since 2016. Based in London, he oversees a global news & features squad based in NY, LA and across. You lot may accept as well seen/heard him on the Total Geekall podcast, unaffiliated YouTube channels, BBC Radio and CBC News. Growing upward in the English countryside on a mixture of Star Wars, The Simpsons and Aardman, Alex is a lifelong picture obsessive. Despite a brief jaunt in Mathematics at Durham University, motion picture writing was always his calling. He's covered a broad range of movies and Television set shows - from digging out obscure MCU Easter eggs to diving deep into deeper meanings of arthouse fare - and has covered a litany of ready visits, junkets and film festivals. He in one case asked Tom Cruise almost his supposedly false-butt in Valkyrie (he swore it was all real).

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