The Russo Brothers Try To Explain How The 'Age Of Ultron' Post-Credits Scene Fits In 'Infinity War'

In the Avengers: Age of Ultron credits scene, an increasingly-impatient Thanos (Josh Brolin) opens a vault, reaches in, grabs a stone-less gauntlet, and says, "Fine. I'll do it myself." But in an interview with Avengers: Infinity War writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, they intimated that they weren't going to deal with the ramifications of that scene.

"Not our movie," McFeely said, referring to Age of Ultron. Markus then chimed in: "And we've all sat there and went, "What the hell is he talking about? Where was he when he did that?'"

Now Infinity War directors Anthony and Joe Russo have commented about how the Age of Ultron credits scene aligns with the events of Infinity War. And just like with real estate, it's all about location, location, location.

Here's the Ultron post-credits sequence if you need to jog your memory:

Thanos begins Avengers: Infinity War with the gauntlet, and with all the confusion about how it fits in with the timeline, the people at ComicBook.com caught up with the Russo Brothers and asked them directly. Joe Russo says the answer involves the dwarf king Eitiri, played by Peter Dinklage in Infinity War:

"I think that it would be connected to Eitri. I think that clearly he is the one who forged the gauntlet and Thanos had the gauntlet at that point in time. It's been a while since any of the Asgardians have interacted with Eitri and his people."

Going all the way back to the first Iron Man, Marvel's post-credits scenes have primarily taken place just after the events of the movies to which they're attached. So that seemingly means Thanos slaughtered the residents of Nidavillir and forced Eitri to forge this gauntlet several years before the events of Infinity War.

We recently wrote about Infinity War's continuity errors, and in a resulting conversation on Twitter, one user pointed out a couple of potential problems with the logic as it's presented in the movie:

My main issue with that is why didn't anyone else go there? Was the star only for use in building asgardian weapons? Someone would of had to have stopped there for something to find it destroyed.

— TripleBaconator (@MildlyWaffle) April 30, 2018

Rocket was quoted saying that nivadellir created terrible weapons known throughout the universe. I would take this as multiple weapons for multiple races. The canon of nivadellir is a giant continuity error on MCU.

— TripleBaconator (@MildlyWaffle) April 30, 2018

I'm not sure that alone is enough to call Nidavellir's canon a "giant continuity error," but it certainly raises more questions about the timeline. Here's an example: one easy workaround for those observations would be that the stories Rocket had heard about Nidavellir were from years before Thanos showed up there.

I think the Russo Brothers are reaching a bit with their explanation, especially when the writers of their movie were baffled at the Ultron post-credits scene. But at the same time, this is a pretty small nitpick. If this is among the worst snafus Marvel Studios has experienced when dealing with a multi-franchise 19-movie behemoth, it's safe to say they're doing pretty well with the gargantuan task of managing the ins and outs of the MCU timeline.