MCU Fan Edit Adds Thanos to The Avengers’ Battle for New York

Thanos may have been the key antagonist for Marvel’s first three phases of films, but the character did not make an onscreen appearance until one of the post-credits tags at the end of Marvel’s The Avengers. That just wasn’t good enough for one fan, who has expanded out the Marvel multiverse by creating a version of the movie in which Thanos showed up for the Battle for New York, presumably in the hopes of getting his hands on Loki’s staff and the Mind Stone a little earlier this time around (hey, if it worked for the heroes…!).

YouTuber Activesufi brought the fight to life, sharing it along with the comment that Thanos “is lucky Scarlet Witch isn’t around.” In the pre-Multiverse of Madness days, it would have been hard to imagine a fight this one-sided playing out in a Marvel movie…but here were are.

You can see it below.

Of course, without the Infinity Stones, it’s difficult to imagine Thanos winning the day — but he had known enough to attack his foes when they were less experienced, and with an army at his side, maybe things would have gone differently. Then again, he was only beaten in the “real” timeline through the use of time travel technology, and if something as cataclysmic as the Snap happened, it’s likely somebody, somewhere, would have figured out how to use that tech to rewrite the past — even if they, too, had to go back to the Battle for New York.

While Thanos missed it, the Battle for New York became a key historical moment for characters within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, referenced in the Netflix shows, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, and pretty much every Thanos-centric movie except Guardians of the Galaxy. It makes sense: the existence of aliens suddenly became widespread public knowledge, and some of these superheroes had never shown up in a big, public way before. It would be a reality-altering experience for the people living in the MCU.

Speaking of reality-altering experiences, the same folks who put this together also have an equally brutal look at what would happen if the Multiverse of Madness version of Scarlet Witch were to have appeared in the battle at the end of Avengers: Endgame. You can check that out here.

All four Avengers movies are currently streaming on Disney+.