What the Captain America: Brave New World End-Credits Scene Means

Credit - Disney+

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Captain America: Brave New World.

Captain America: Brave New World is the first Marvel movie to be released in more than six months, one of the lengthiest gaps between films in the studio's history. So it's somewhat surprising that Brave New World features just one end credits scene—but it's a big one in terms of setting up what happens next in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The end credits of Captain America: Brave New World sets up the already-announced 2027 film, Avengers: Secret Wars.

Anthony Mackie's Captain America visits Tim Blake Nelson's villainous Samuel Sterns on the Raft, a maximum-security prison. Sterns has an abnormally large brain thanks to exposure to Bruce Banner's gamma-soaked blood, a factoid you probably don't remember from 2008's The Incredible Hulk. His admittedly lame superpower is calculating the odds of things. So, basically, he's a supervillain version of the New York Times election needle.

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In an ominous monologue, Sterns says that odds suggest there are parallel universes. "Do you think you're the only ones? Do you think it's only this world?" he asks. "We'll see what happens when you have to protect it from the others."

The clear implication is that the MCU is headed toward a clash of parallel universes. The Avengers in this timeline—yes, the very same group who disbanded after many years of adventures until Harrison Ford's Thaddeus Ross pointedly implores Cap to put a new super-team together—will have to fight The Avengers from other timelines. Gird yourself for Captain America battling another version of himself.

Marvel has been teasing this plot development for a long time. The 2027 film Avengers: Secret Wars will be based on a comic book series about the collapse of all parallel universes. The post-collision universe is known as "Battleworld," a planet where all the various superheroes and villains from across the MCU timelines fight one other.

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The storyline served as a major reset for the comics and could also provide that opportunity for the MCU films. New actors could take on iconic roles. (Fans have been speculating that Michael B. Jordan might play a parallel universe Black Panther.) Characters that have not historically existed in the main MCU universe could enter it, including the Fantastic Four and X-Men. Conveniently, we'll see the premiere of The Fantastic Four: First Steps this summer, and you might recall that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine just made his triumphant return to the MCU in 2024's smash hit Deadpool & Wolverine. Those movies took place in parallel timelines that are just begging to crash into Captain America's world. And some retired MCU actors might even return. We already know Robert Downey Jr. is coming back not as Iron Man but the villain Doctor Doom, likely via some parallel universe shenanigans.

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So the idea that parallel universes exist and that the Avengers might have to fight heroes or villains from those other worlds isn't exactly a major revelation for MCU fans—or, one would hope, for Captain America. Multiple MCU characters have hopped across timelines.

Doctor Strange, for instance, opened up a portal that allowed various Spider-Men from other universes to team up with Tom Holland's Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Strange then skipped across the multiverse and even encountered other versions of himself in a movie pointedly titled Multiverse of Madness. Ant-Man met a villain named Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania who battled multiple versions of himself from different timelines.

Do these superheroes not have a text chain where they share this information with one another? Does Doctor Strange not let his superpowered buddies know there may be evil doppelgängers running around? Did Ant-Man didn't shoot a note to the other Avengers to just mention, "Hey, met a weird and scary dude who claimed there are infinite universes filled with terrifying versions of him?"

The Avengers really need to get it together before they face this parallel universe thread. The now disgraced President Ross tasked Captain America with relaunching the super-team in Brave New World. Maybe this redundant speech by a B-list supervillain will motivate the new Cap to do exactly that. We don't need to ask Samuel Sterns to know that the odds are high that the Avengers will assemble again.

Write to Eliana Dockterman at eliana.dockterman@time.com.