Like almost any film involving time travel, if you look hard enough at Avengers: Endgame, you will probably find plot holes. It’s just that the supposed error exposed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! wasn’t one of them.
Last month, the cast of Spider-Man: Far From Home went on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show and were apparently stumped when the host grilled them on a supposed Avengers: Endgame error.
Since Far From Home takes place five years after Thanos initially snapped half of life out of existence, Kimmel asked the cast: “Why, then, are you all still in high school?” After all, with the time jump, surely some of the cast would have to be older.
They were flummoxed.
“Why … why are we still in high school?” said Tom Holland.
Jacob Batalon added: “It might be one of the biggest plot holes of all time.”
Headlines didn’t really question it, saying Holland didn’t understand the “plot hole” and the cast was stumped by the apparent faux pas.
But wait, isn’t this answer already out there?
At the end of Avengers: Endgame, once the previously snapped people are brought back to life, you see Holland’s Peter Parker reunite with Batalon’s Ned at school, making it appear that they both had been snapped away and have now returned to be the same age. Far From Home director Jon Watts also already confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that Zendaya’s MJ and Tony Revolori’s Flash were snapped and brought back too.
So it seems clear why the characters haven’t aged in the meantime, something the cast should be aware of. If that’s the case, what was going on in that Kimmel interview?
Watts confirmed the cast was just playing coy.
“I think they were just afraid of spoiling it. They didn’t know what they were allowed to say and not say,” he told HuffPost.
The director was actually at the taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live! but he was in the audience and couldn’t do anything to clear up the confusion.
“I was like, ’Guys, come on. Explain it. It sounds like you don’t know what we’re talking about.’”
Dealing with the fallout from the five-year time jump in Endgame, Watts had to consider many more conundrums besides just keeping his main cast the same age.
“There are so many ideas we had,” he said. “I was talking to [Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely] about twins. We were talking about what would happen if one twin blipped out. It’d still be twins, but one of them would be five years older, which would be really strange.”
He added: “Thanos said all living entities, all living beings, half of all of them, so does that include bacteria? Did half of the stomach bacteria inside of you disappear and people get really sick?”
There were also other potentially more gruesome questions to consider.
“What would happen to people in motion, if you’re in a car or in an airplane?” said the director. “Obviously, they didn’t blip back in the middle of the sky and fall to the Earth because so many people would die.”
Watts said: “There are so many questions, but we just stuck with the ones that made sense in our story.”
So what would happen to people who came back who were previously in an airplane?
“I was like, you know what, I’m not going to touch that one,” Watts joked, explaining the idea was really that everyone came back in one piece.
“That’s the thing. Everyone arrived back safely somehow. I don’t think suddenly people were raptured back to Earth and plummeted into the ocean. That would not be the happy ending that [Tony Stark] was planning.”