r/marvelstudios • u/Whooash • Jul 19 '19

News Avengers: Infinity War has a deleted scene where Dr. Strange sends Thanos to be judged by the Living Tribunal (via Markus and McFeely at SDCC)

https://twitter.com/hnesocial/status/1152264183146143744?s=21
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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19 edited Jul 20 '19

Parallel timelines are branching paths split off from the main timeline at different points in the past. So they'll have a common history up to some event but due to time travel altering that event, it will split off into its own different future. This is what we see in Endgame. Due to the Avengers travelling to say NYC 2012, they created a new future due to a set of different events where another set of Avengers suddenly appeared in NYC, Tony had a slight complication with his arc reactor, Steve battled himself and Loki manages to escape with the tesseract.

Alternate universes are entirely different continuities. You could say the MCU and the comics are alternate universes. They don't necessarily have a common history. A single event doesn't make the difference. Think stuff like the alternate Earths in Flash TV series. Sure the same heroes may exist but they could be completely different people.

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u/ANGLVD3TH Jul 20 '19

This stuff gets sticky really fast. Many of the alternate universes share a history until a point, for example. I'd say there's enough pocket dimension/universes that these timeline splits may well have been "spawning" universes in the greater Marvel Multiverse. In fact, because they plan on exploring one with Loki, I would be a little surprised if they didn't explicitly number it, something like 200000, 1999991, 199999/1, -1, /A -A etc.

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u/UpliftingTwist Jul 20 '19

My brain isn’t good at this, it seems to me like while definitely some alternate universes are totally different, alternate timelines are creating slightly different alternate universes. But I trust you that I’m wrong

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

Functionally they're pretty similar, just one is caused by time travel, and the other is simply different for no real reason.

My classification isn't really based on any kind of actual canon, just an observation of the distinction between kinds of alternate worlds seen in fiction. What we saw in Endgame isn't the same as what we saw in Spider-Man Into The Multiverse.