How the Avengers: Endgame trailer hints that Captain Marvel will save the day (and Iron Man)

The trailer for Avengers 4 — now officially titled Avengers: Endgame — arrived on Friday morning, offering a first look at the final chapter of the Avengers cinematic saga and raising a couple big questions in the process.

Unlike Avengers trailers of the past, the Avengers: Endgame trailer does not contain snippets of giant fight scenes, nor do we see our favorite superheroes show off any of their powers. Thanos, the main villain of Avengers: Infinity War, barely makes an appearance outside of one scene where he’s walking through a field.

Instead, we see characters like Captain America and Black Widow mourning their vaporized colleagues and trying to figure out a plan to save the world. There are also moments featuring Hawkeye in a new costume and Nebula looking down and out. (In its own perverse way, it would be hilarious if the fate of the universe somehow came down to Hawkeye.)

But there are individual scenes involving two Avengers — one with Iron Man being lonely in space, and the other with Ant-Man surprising the remaining members of the team on Earth — that open the door for a couple of interesting arrivals and wrinkles in the Avengers’ plan to defeat Thanos. Here’s how the new trailer hints at what might play out.

The first part of the Avengers: Endgame trailer finds Iron Man drifting in space and running out of sustenance and oxygen, sort of like The Martian if the Martian were a sad and beat-up Tony Stark.

If you saw Infinity War, you’ll know that there were two factions of superheroes fighting Thanos in two different places: on a planet called Titan, and on Earth in the African nation of Wakanda. Thanos defeated the Avengers on Titan first, after Star-Lord bungled a plan, allowing Thanos to acquire Doctor Strange’s Infinity Stone. Then Thanos moved on to Wakanda, where, after acquiring Vision’s Infinity Stone, he eliminated half the life in the universe with a snap of his chubby purple fingers.

Left behind on Titan with Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, Iron Man watched his two teammates evaporate right in front of him. That’s where this trailer, with Iron Man drifting off and dying “alone” (technically, it seems he’s with the cybernetic assassin known as Nebula, which is basically like dying alone), ostensibly picks up.

So Endgame will seemingly begin with Iron Man needing a cosmic rescue. And that sounds like a job for Captain Marvel.

In the post-credits scene for Infinity War, Nick Fury sends a message to Captain Marvel on a device that looks like a sad T-Mobile Sidekick:

Captain Marvel is a space commander who was once, according to the trailers we’ve seen for her upcoming solo movie, part of an elite space force brigade. The device that Fury uses in the Infinity War post-credits scene could be some kind of special gadget that could reach Captain Marvel wherever she may be. Otherwise he’d use a phone or just shoot her a text, right?

With the Guardians of the Galaxy having been dusted by Thanos and the capabilities or limitations of Thor’s Bifrost travel-enabled weapon still unknown, the most logical hero to come zipping through the universe to save Tony (and I guess Nebula) has to be Captain Marvel.

In the post-credits scene of Ant-Man and The Wasp, which came out in July, Scott Lang is off collecting particles in the Quantum Realm — the dimension he visits by shrinking down to subatomic size — to help learn and heal his newfound friend Ghost, and probably to further figure out the effects of the Quantum Realm on the original Wasp, a.k.a. Janet Van Dyne.

While he’s in the Quantum Realm, his team in the outside world — Hank, Janet, and Hope — gets vaporized by Thanos’s snap.

Yet he somehow appears in the trailer for Endgame, to the surprise of everyone — the Avengers and audience alike.

It was established in the original Ant-Man movie, as well as in the Ant-Man and the Wasp sequel, that shrinking down and entering the Quantum Realm is very risky. Janet once got stuck there. And getting someone in and out of the dimension has usually required multiple people.

What we know currently is that only a few people knew that Scott was getting lowered into the Quantum Realm at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, and that those few people got vaporized by Thanos. Additionally, the number of people who know about the Quantum Realm in the first place, and the number of genius scientists who would be able to access it, are slim.

Minor spoiler alert: Because of Avengers: Endgame set photos in which some of the Avengers have Quantum Realm devices attached to their persons, some fans have started to theorize that the Quantum Realm will function as a means of time travel for the Avengers, perhaps to go back in time to before Thanos snapped.

There’s also a theory circulating that Captain Marvel is not actually in space, but in the Quantum Realm instead, and that she could possibly help Scott Lang and the Avengers defeat Thanos through the realm, by leveraging the realm and its special capabilities.

But for right now, all we know is that Scott most likely needed help to get himself out of the realm before he could show up in the Endgame trailer. So the obvious question is not only who did it, but whether that person could also assist the Avengers, who need all the help they can get.

Now, I’m of the Occam’s Razor belief when it comes to Marvel movies: The easiest explanation is almost always what will happen. To date, Captain Marvel has only been shown in space, and she is a space commander.

And the Quantum Realm has so far only been introduced in the Ant-Man movies. It’d make more sense for Captain Marvel to be zipping around the galaxy, maybe attending to the cosmic crises in Thanos’s warpath or doing other noble deeds instead of floating around the Quantum Realm with giant tardigrades.

Plus, there’s another rumor circulating that Avengers: Endgame actually takes place four years in the future. This rumor is bolstered by casting rumors that Cassie Lang, Scott’s daughter, is actually a teen in the movie. Cassie Lang, in Marvel’s comic books, takes after her father’s superheroics and size-changing abilities, so if that storyline is mirrored in the MCU, she could potentially represent another lifeline for Scott that wouldn’t require Captain Marvel to get involved.

But regardless of who helped Scott get out, his return sparks hope in the Avengers: Endgame trailer, showing the down-and-out duo of Captain America and Black Widow that anything is possible. And that’s important if this team has any hope of defeating Thanos.

Avengers: Endgame is scheduled to open in theaters on April 26, 2019.