WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Avengers Endgame.
The classic film is mentioned when Bruce Banner is explaining how time travel works in the MCU.
In Back To The Future, it’s a Butterfly Effect-style approach – where altering the past messes with the present.
But in Avengers, that’s not the case: the past can’t be changed, and travelling back to a specific time just makes that experience the time traveller’s current present at that moment – even if it risks opening up different alternate timelines.
Banner specifically says that the Back To The Future way about things is incorrect – and that’s something Gale has warmly reacted to now.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: “I was delighted to learn from Endgame that all of the Marvel superheroes are fans of Back to the Future.
“I knew our movie had been seen in almost every part of our world, but I had no idea we’d been playing in other parts of the multi-verse too.”
He joked: “Now I need to find out if we’re owed some money from those multi-verse theatrical runs, and if not, why my contract didn’t cover those territories!”
Time travel in the MCU enabled the Avengers to travel back to certain points in history to retrieve different Infinity Stones before Thanos could get his hands on them.
While this didn’t wipe the Snap from history, it did enable them to bring the Stones back to 2023 – when the main timeline of the film is set – and bring everybody who died back.
At the end of the film, Steve Rogers – aka Captain America – has to go back in time once more to put the stones back where he found them, to prevent extensive multiverses and alternate timelines from making things even more complicated.
But he decides to stay in the ‘past’, building a life with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).
Avengers: Endgame has been phenomenally successful worldwide, and is closing in on overtaking Avatar’s record as the highest-grossing movie worldwide of all time.
However industry experts have suggested it is unlikely to outpace Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ record for the highest ever gross in the USA alone.
Nonetheless, it will be top of the country’s box office for a third weekend – despite Detective Pikachu mildly disrupting it yesterday.
Avengers: Endgame is out now.