Avengers Campus Calls on Marvel Multiverse to Explain Its Place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Canon

Avengers Campus has a “shared history” with the Marvel Studios film franchise but is not canon with the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the way Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is set within the mainstream Star Wars universe, ComicBook.com learned during a behind-the-scenes preview of the entirely new land opening soon inside Disney California Adventure Park at the Disneyland Resort. Tapping into the unlimited possibilities of the multiverse, Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering storytellers mark Avengers: Endgame as a point of divergence between the film continuity and the theme park universe, which tells a globally interconnected story inspired by the Marvel Studios canon.

“It’s not canon with it the way that Star Wars is canon with Galaxy’s Edge,” Walt Disney Imagineering staff writer and Avengers Campus story lead Jillian Pagan told ComicBook.com. “Galaxy’s Edge is definitely in that fixed point in the Star Wars canon, but I wouldn’t say that we are not canonical in our own way.”

In Avengers: Endgame, what was left of Earth’s mightiest heroes assembled to travel backwards through time to collect the six cosmic-powered Infinity Stones needed to reverse Thanos’ snap that wiped out half of all life in the universe in Avengers: Infinity War.

Avengers Campus creatives confirmed the apocalyptic snap never occurred in this version of the Marvel universe.

“The lovely thing about the comic books and the films is that between them we’ve seen a million different versions of the multiverse, a million different versions of these characters. Avengers: Endgame especially gave us the opportunity to go back in time and then split off in a different timeline,” Pagan said. “So that’s how we like to look at our activation that we have, if you think about when [the Avengers] went back to 2012 and Endgame, they had a shared history. The two timelines had a shared history up until that point.”

“And then there was a divergence and Loki takes the Tesseract over here and they’re doing things over there, and in our timeline we have a shared history with the films,” Pagan continued. “We will continue to have a shared history as we move forward, so there’ll be a little bit of fluidity to that timeline, but clearly we live in a version of the multiverse where there are some characters who did not sacrifice themselves for us. They are alive and well and now welcome you to it.”

One such character is Iron Man, who has a designated Heroic Encounter location at Avengers Headquarters in the center of Avengers Campus.

In a first for the Disneyland Resort, recruits can meet Tony Stark as he showcases a never-before-seen Iron Man armor: the Mark 80. The Disney Parks exclusive armor is designed by Ryan Meinerding, the Head of Visual Development at Marvel Studios.

Pagan also revealed Doctor Strange, one of many superheroes on hand at Avengers Campus, will help explain the mysteries of the multiverse to guests when they interact with the Sorcerer Supreme as he demonstrates mystic arts in a magical area called The Sanctum.

“We will at the front of the land also have a plaque that outlines kind of the mission of the campus, and on that we say that heroes have assembled from across time and space here to train you,” Pagan said.

Avengers Campus opens this summer inside Disney California Adventure Park at the Disneyland Resort. Purchase tickets.