The Avengers is a monumental feat of cinema that cemented the popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but its timeline may get a bit lost in the shuffle. This is part 6 in a 20 part video series discussing when each film in the MCU takes place. So when does The Avengers really Take Place?

“That man is playing Galaga. Thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

This film arrived on May 4th, 2012, which coincidentally is also the date that a portion of the film takes place. In fact, it’s one of the only MCU films to do this aside from Iron Man. We know that the film occurs on or after 2012, thanks to this banner in the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility early on, and we know it must occur before June 26, as this fictional concert poster would have been covered over had it passed. We also know that 3 days elapse from when Loki steals the Tesseract, and the Battle of NY. Here we have Natasha saying “he killed 80 people in 2 days,” meaning he attacked the S.H.I.E.L.D. base 2 days ago, and the next day is when the Battle of NY ultimately occurs. So how do we know it takes place the week of May 4th? This exhibit banner for a museum in Stuttgart, Germany claims it begins on May 4th, 2012, and here we have Loki crashing its inauguration party. So this film begins on May 3rd, 2012, and ends on May 5th.

There is one particular confusion that stems from this film; that being the time period that the Fury’s Big Week movies occur in, as we spoke about in Parts 2, 3, and 4. Iron Man 2 would have us believe they took place in 2010, but Fury makes the point of saying it was the events of Thor that caused S.H.I.E.L.D. to take such drastic measures. And he says it happened last year. This is obviously a retcon of when these 3 films took place, though it’s strange. We know that the events in Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk also happened at the same time, and we got far more widespread damage and potential loss of life in those two films. This was likely a mistake in continuity, that has since been adopted as an updated canon. It’s also important to note that Age of Ultron mentions this movie may have taken place on or around April 3 2012, a month prior, but this scene also shares dates that contradict its validity, but we’ll discuss that in part 11.

That said, 100% of this film’s runtime took place in 2012.