New Avengers Fan Theory Suggests Doctor Strange Was Stuck in a 5000-Year Time Loop

With Avengers: Infinity War being one of the most complicated films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, it's to be expected that—nearly a year after its original release—fans are still rabidly analyzing each and every scene to come up with plausible theories for hidden storylines. One Redditor did just that and realized something potentially major.

CleverD3vil took to Reddit to share his discoveries after analyzing one of Doctor Strange’s most memorable scenes in Infinity War. The scene in question, as fans will remember, sees Strange look forward in time 14,000,605 times, in order to find every possible scenario in which the Avengers face off against Thanos. Benedict Cumberbatch’s character then tells Iron Man that there is only one future where the heroes win.

CleverD3vil theorized that if Strange were to watch every possible scenario, he would have—at the very least—had to watch all of the events that went down in Infinity War. If you take the movie's three-hour runtime and multiply it by that 14,000,605 number, that would give Strange more than 42 million hours of scenarios to review. Since there are 8760 hours in a year, that would mean that Strange spent roughly 4795 years just viewing the possible outcomes. (The fan rounded that total up to 5000 on Reddit.) That's a lot of years, and a lot of time for Doctor Strange to work out how to best use his powers to help fight Thanos.

"In those 5000 years, [Strange] would have learned a sh** ton of things," the Redditor writes, "and this is how he could even put up a fight with Thanos with different kind of powers and [e]specially without the stone."

Although Doctor Strange ultimately disintegrates at the hands of Thanos’s snap in Infinity War, we’re assuming we’ll see him again come Avengers: Endgame. If this theorist is onto something, perhaps Strange could be ready to use his powers once more in the next inevitable battle against the Mad Titan.

Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26, 2019.