The Avengers franchise emerged from comic panels of 1963, crafted by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and was first translated into a blockbuster by Marvel Studios in 2012. That film established a shared universe where heroes crossed over, setting a template that would expand over the next decade.
By 2018’s Infinity War, the MCU had branched into multiple narratives, each building toward a collective conflict. Endgame was conceived as the grand finale, drawing from the multiverse concept introduced in earlier films and leveraging a narrative device—time travel—that had roots in earlier science‑fiction storytelling.