It’s important to note that while we’ll break down where Spider-Man: Homecoming claims it takes place, each and every date and reference to time needs to be held up to intense scrutiny, because the majority of it is wrong, pure and simple. This is part 16 of a 20 part video series discussing when each film in the MCU takes place. So when exactly does Homecoming take place?

“Hey, how long we been here anyways?” “37 minutes.” “What!? 37 minutes, that’s insane!”

We start the film with footage from shortly after the Battle of NY, which in part 6 we discussed occurred sometime around April or May of 2012. But then we get this incredible jump in time with an 8 Years Later title card. This is either saying that Avengers occurred in 2008, or that this film occurs in 2020. Neither can be true. Adrian Toomes later reiterates this false timeline. “8 years.” My best guess is that this is somehow compensating for the fact that Adrian shared a drawing from his daughter Liz at the start of the film that would make no sense for her to have drawn, being that she’d be about 13 or 14 during the Battle of NY. Regardless, disregard it as factual.

We can also disregard this 2 months later title card, as we discussed in Part 13 that Civil War occurred in early April 2016, and all signs point to this occurring in September 2017. Well, most signs anyway. This poster claims the Decathlon is in October, but then they fix it so that their trip to DC takes place on September 13th and 14th, and the Homecoming dance occurs the week after. We know it assumes itself to be 2017 from a number of onscreen dates, but the most telling is the age of weapons dealer Aaron Davis, who is “age 33”, making this 2017. But obviously this is nonsense as it supposes itself to be two months after an event in Spring 2016. We’re willing to settle for 5 months later, meaning the film takes place in September of 2016. But hey, the film gets at least one thing right. The fact that Happy’s been holding this ring since Tony and Pepper got together, and says that the year was 2008, “I’ve been carrying this since 2008,” gives slightly more credence to when we determined Iron Man to take place in Parts 1 and 13. But because this film makes such huge mistakes, take any dates featured with generous doses of salt.

The end-credits scene here features Captain America in his Avengers 1 outfit, so we’re going to hazard a guess that it place in 2012 sometime after the Battle of NY. So 3.2% of the runtime was allocated to 2012, and the remaining 96.8% took place in 2016.