SALT LAKE CITY — “Avengers: Endgame” writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely told ComicBook.com in a recent interview that they modeled the time travel elements of “Avengers: Endgame” after “Harry Potter” and “Back to the Future.”
- “We went back and watched both ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Back to the Future 2,’ specifically,” McFeely told ComicBook.com. “But you can already predict why we did this, right? If we were gonna go back and follow time travel [rules], call them normal, it also tells how important 'Back to the Future' is. Everyone thinks that that’s how time travel works because that’s a great movie, maybe the best of its subject. If we were do that, to do something in the past and it’s gonna screw up your future, we’re gonna do that six times. We would have no way to follow that. It would just be exponentially crazy town.”
McFeely said the third act from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” also played a role.
- “I do love, see, that third ‘Harry Potter’ movie, where a stone will break a vase. You don’t know why and the scene’s fine and it doesn’t take you out of it,” McFeely said. “Then when you come back around and you realize that they had thrown it at themselves, I do love that.”
Read more: Avengers: Endgame Writers Reveal What Moment From Harry Potter Influenced Them (Brandon Davis, ComicBook.com)
Context: The plot of “Avengers: Endgame” centers heavily on time travel as the Avengers head back in time to obtain the Infinity Stones so they can reverse the Thanos Snap, which happened at the end of “Infinity War.” In the film, the characters poke fun at various time travel movies, including “Back to the Future.” Oddly enough, “Harry Potter” is not mentioned among those films.