MCU
Marvel Studios admits its biggest continuity mistake in the MCU and can’t justify it
In the first Spider-Man trilogy with Tom Holland, Marvel Studios screwed up the chronology of events, and not even the multiverse can save the situation.
It is clear that building a shared universe with so many characters, situations, movies, and series is not easy, although Marvel Studios has made a serious continuity error that affects its chronology; and not even the current games with the multiverse can solve it. This is clear from the recent book Marvel Studios The Marvel Cinematic Universe: An Official Timeline, a book that serves as a definitive guide to following and understanding a chronology as broad and complex as the one orchestrated by Kevin Feige. And it was the Spider-Man trilogy with Tom Holland that made the MCU dizzying.
Spider-Man Homecoming’ and the extra years
The prologue of ‘Spider-Man Homecoming’ picks up immediately after the events of ‘The Avengers’, with a colossal final battle in Manhattan that takes place in 2012. Shortly thereafter, we return to the movie’s present day, 2020, which creates a continuity glitch as the movie is supposed to take place two months after ‘Captain America: Civil War’.
In this sense, Adrian Toomes - the character played by Michael Keaton who ends up being the Vulture - adds fuel to the fire after asserting that he has managed to evade the FBI for eight years, a fact that the book on the continuity of the MCU highlights as a mistake. In this sense, it resorts to the character of Miss Minutes from the series ‘Loki’ to try to classify this mistake:
“Hi again! Adrian Toomes says the Battle of New York was eight years ago, but that event was only four years prior. This one’s a real head-scratcher for us — I reckon an analyst misplaced the case file,” assures TVA’s disturbing AI. All in all, this is a minor error of no great significance, and one that Marvel itself is aware of, having referred to it on several occasions.
And Joe Russo himself - co-director of ‘Captain America: Civil War’, the movie in which we first saw Tom Holland’s Spider-Man - has already responded to the MCU’s continuity error: “It was eight years, I believe. It was a very incorrect eight years.”