Avengers: Endgame Easter Eggs: 24 References, Callbacks And Comic Nods You Missed

Seven years on, Avengers: Endgame still functions less like a film than like a museum wing. Almost every scene in the middle hour is built on top of an older one, and the time-heist structure gives the Russos licence to walk the cast back through their own greatest hits. Below are the references we can actually verify on screen or in on-the-record comments from the people who made it. Nothing invented, nothing borrowed from a fan wiki that nobody has ever confirmed.

The time heist callbacks

1. 2012 New York is shot to match The Avengers. The Battle of New York sequence recreates specific compositions from the 2012 film, including the Stark Tower exterior and the street-level chaos, so the 2023 Avengers can walk through frames we already know.
2. Cap's 'Hail Hydra' whisper. Steve leans into Jasper Sitwell's ear to steal the sceptre, and the line is a direct nod to Nick Spencer's Secret Empire era, in which Steve Rogers is rewritten as a Hydra agent. It is the single biggest comics in-joke in the film.
3. 'I can do this all day.' Steve fights his 2012 self and hears his own catchphrase thrown back at him, then answers with a weary 'I know, I know.' The line dates to Captain America: The First Avenger.
4. Camp Lehigh, 1970. The New Jersey base is where Arnim Zola's computer was hidden in The Winter Soldier, and the barracks Steve trained in during 1943 are visible on the same lot.
5. Peggy through the blinds. Steve sees Peggy Carter in her office and freezes. The nameplate, the office and the framed photo of a pre-serum Steve on her desk all set up the film's last scene.
6. Edwin Jarvis in the flesh. James D'Arcy's Jarvis drives Howard Stark's car, the first and so far only time an Agent Carter cast member has appeared in an MCU film.
7. Thanos's Garden. The retirement farm is lifted from Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet, where Thanos becomes a farmer after the snap. His armour hangs on a pole as a scarecrow.
8. Frigga's last day. Thor meets his mother on the day she dies in Thor: The Dark World, which is why she already knows she is not talking to her son.
9. Luis's van. The van that Scott is trapped in is the same beaten-up Ford from the Ant-Man films, and its cassette deck is what nearly ends the entire plan.

The comic-book nods

10. Cap lifts Mjolnir

The single loudest crowd moment in the film was planted four years earlier: in Age of Ultron, Steve budges the hammer a fraction of an inch and Thor's face falls. Endgame confirms he was always worthy and was simply being polite about it.

11. Pepper's Rescue armour

Pepper Potts flying in the Mark 49 pays off the comics' Rescue identity, which Pepper adopted in Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man run. The MCU had teased it since Iron Man 3, when Pepper briefly wore the Mark 42.

12. The A-Force line-up

When Captain Marvel takes the Gauntlet and every female hero on the field forms up around her, that is a live-action nod to A-Force, the all-women Avengers team created by G. Willow Wilson, Marguerite Bennett and Jorge Molina during the 2015 Secret Wars event.

13. Howard the Duck in the portals

Blink and you miss him: Howard the Duck stands among the Ravagers and Wakandans in the portal shot, his second MCU appearance after the Collector's museum.

14. Valkyrie's winged horse

Valkyrie rides a pegasus into the final battle, the closest the MCU has come to Aragorn, her winged steed from the comics.

15. 'Avengers, assemble.'

Eleven years and twenty-one films after Iron Man, Steve finally says the full line. Joss Whedon deliberately cut it off mid-word at the end of Age of Ultron to save it.

16. The Big Lebowski gag

Rocket calls the New Asgard version of Thor 'Lebowski,' and the costume, hair and robe are all built to land that joke. It is one of several needle-drops of 1990s reference comedy the Russos scatter through the New Asgard section.

17. Korg plays Fortnite

The game Thor and Korg are screaming at is Fortnite, which had run a genuine Avengers crossover event in the real world the month before Endgame opened.

The small ones almost nobody catches

That last one is the detail we would argue is the best in the film. Endgame does not end on music or dialogue. It ends on the sound of a man beating metal into armour in a cave, which is the exact sound the MCU began with. Nothing on screen tells you that; you simply hear it as the credits arrive.

1. 'I love you 3000.' Robert Downey Jr. has said the line came from his own children, and it is repeated back at Tony from his recorded message.
2. Tony's photo with Peter. The framed picture on the cabin shelf is from the ceremony scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it is what pushes Tony to solve time travel.
3. 'That's America's ass.' Steve inspects his own 2012 backside; the line pays off Ant-Man's earlier crack about the same suit.
4. 'I am inevitable' / 'And I am Iron Man.' Thanos's mantra from Infinity War is answered with the line that closed Iron Man in 2008.
5. Loki takes the Tesseract. A throwaway consequence of the botched 2012 heist that became an entire Disney+ series, and eventually the spine of the Multiverse Saga.
6. Stan Lee's hippie cameo. Digitally de-aged, driving through 1970 New Jersey with 'Nuff Said' and 'Make Love, Not War' on his bumper. His final live-action MCU appearance, filmed before his death in November 2018.
7. The last dance. Steve and Peggy dance to It's Been a Long, Long Time, the song that had been scoring his loss since The Winter Soldier's soundtrack cues.

The film's final sound is not a line or a theme. It is a hammer on metal in a cave in Afghanistan.

What we deliberately left off this list

A lot of viral Endgame easter-egg lists include claims we could not stand behind: specific readable text on Tony's lab whiteboards, a supposed Fantastic Four logo in the crowd, and a widely shared reading of the Ancient One's dialogue as a multiverse rulebook. Some of those are misreadings of low-resolution frames and some are simply invented. If you want the arc-reactor engraving and the lab set dressing that we can actually verify, that is covered in our breakdown of Tony's lab.

For the plot mechanics rather than the references, including the argument the film's own writers and directors still have not settled about where Steve Rogers spent his retirement, read our Endgame ending explained. And if you want the setup rather than the payoff, the Infinity War easter egg guide covers the film that planted most of these seeds.