“Avengers: Endgame” Pulled Inspiration for Time Travel from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”

by · July 28, 2019

Both the Harry Potter and the Avengers series are hugely successful franchises all over the world. Whether there are witches and wizards or big, green, strong men and women who can bend reality, both worlds have a lot more similarities than you might think. Many fans have noticed a few of them, including the aspect of time travel, and it was recently confirmed that one of the most important plot points in the latest installment in the Avengers franchise, Avengers: Endgame, took a page out of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban! Figurately, of course.

In the third installment of the Harry Potter series, Hermione Granger used a Time-Turner in order to take more classes. She’d attend one class, turn back time, and attend the other that occurred at the same time as the first. Hermione and Harry later used the Time-Turner to help rescue Buckbeak the hippogriff from being executed. Before leaving to save Buckbeak, Albus Dumbledore warned the two that they must return in time and that they could not be seen by anyone in the past, including themselves.

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the writers of Endgame, relayed that they had some trouble coming up with how time travel in this world would work, as reported by Elite Daily. In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos, the villain of the movie, collected all the Infinity Stones and used a gauntlet to wipe out 50% of all living creatures, which unfortunately included a lot of beloved superheroes. In order to reverse the damage, the Avengers left alive had to travel back in time to collect the Infinity Stones for their own Infinity Gauntlet. Audiences now are quite used to how time travel works, or at least how it did in the Back to the Future series, which played an incredible role in shaping the rules of time travel in pop culture. Markus and McFeely knew that those rules wouldn’t work since they don’t quite make sense:

We went back and watched both ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Back to the Future 2’ specifically. Everyone thinks that that’s how time travel works because that’s a great movie [-] maybe the best of its subject – but if we were to [follow those rules], to do something in the past, it’s gonna screw up your future; we’re going to do that six times….

So the writers then looked to Harry Potter and found that abiding by those guidelines would serve a better purpose:

I do love that third ‘Harry Potter’ movie where [we see] a stone break a vase. You don’t know why, but the scene’s fine, and it doesn’t take you out of it. Then when you come back around [during the time travel], and you realize that THEY had thrown it at THEMSELVES, I do love that.

Elite Daily does point out that a lot of Marvel fans didn’t like how the time travel happened in Endgame and that J.K. Rowling herself said that although she doesn’t regret it, she might not have done as much research into time travel as was needed, therefore opening up a few plot holes.

What do you think about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban‘s guidelines on time travel? Let us know in the comments!