WARNING: the Russo brothers have said the spoiler moratorium for Avengers: Endgame ends on Monday, but frankly if you’ve not sorted yourself out and seen it by now then what are you really doing? Anyway, there’s spoilers ahead if you’ve been out on the oil rigs or whatever.
Now we’re a week on from the release of Avengers: Endgame, you’ll no doubt have been padding around your flat ruminating quietly on the end of this gargantuan series, staring out of the window into the rain contemplating the meaning of heroism and sacrifice, yearning for an ending where Tony Stark lived and Ant-Man managed to crawl up Thanos’ bum and explode him.
You might be wistfully recalling that bit where Tony’s daughter tells her dad, “I love you 3,000”. Obviously that’s all fuel which is converted into pure emotional exhaust fumes when he carks it at the end, giving up his domestic bliss for the good of the universe, but some fans reckon there’s something deeper hidden in there too
- Go To Brand: I Love You 3000
The theory is that it’s a little nod to the love of the Marvel fandom for the whole enterprise, because if you add up the run times of every MCU film (including the as-yet-unreleased Spider-Man: Far From Home) you get 2,998 minutes.
The numbers are contested, but they’re near enough for it to be believable. However, this cute but throwaway line has turned into a bit of a rabbit hole for fans now bereft of MCU tidbits to work into wildly over-egged theories. One runs that it’s proof positive that the kid is a certifiable genius already – Tony’s line “I love you tons” is taken to refer literally to the unit of mass equivalent to 2,000 imperial pounds, and this five-year-old has clapped straight back at her dad with the next thousand up.
To go along with that you’ve got to ignore that Tony uses the plural, meaning that he loves her at least 4,000 imperial pounds, and therefore his daughter specifies that she loves him significantly less than he loves her, but maybe that’s Endgame‘s real gut-punch, hidden in plain sight.
