Avengers: Endgame is packed with callbacks to the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe due to its timey-wimey plot.

And it turns out that it might have taken the meta references even further by mocking a much-talked about plot hole from Captain America: The First Avenger.

A deleted scene with Captain America and Rhodey – which you can watch on Disney+ – sees the pair have a chat during the planning of the time heist when they're trying to plot the best places to get the Infinity Stones.

Cap tells Rhodey that the Tesseract fell out of the plane into the ocean when "I had to crash it", leading Rhodey to reply: "I've been meaning to ask, why did you have to crash the plane anyway?"

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Cap explains that it's because there were "bombs on board" (and there were a fair few bombs, thanks to HYDRA), but Rhodey isn't impressed. "And you couldn't have jumped out of the plane before you crashed it?," he asks.

This was a common question from Marvel fans, especially after Captain America: The Winter Soldier showed Cap jumping out of a plane and surviving.

Of course, the real explanation is that Cap had to be frozen in the Arctic so that he could be woken up almost 70 years later to help out the Avengers.

His super serum might have slowed his aging, but he wouldn't have been in great physical shape at the time of The Avengers if he hadn't been frozen. (Because, you know freezing perfectly preserves humans alive in suspended animation, and doesn't completely kill them by bursting every cell in their body.)

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Plus, it does mean that The First Avenger has a powerful moment between Steve and Peggy Carter that would fully pay off in Avengers: Endgame's finale.

So really, it's just a convenient story point and not a plot hole as such, but the origin of the scene was actually to poke fun at "logic holes" that Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely saw in earlier MCU movies.

Talking to Yahoo! Entertainment about the time heist, Markus revealed that they got a bit carried away.

"We wrote all sorts of sections where we were poking fun at logic holes in the preceding movies, which amused us but it got to a point where A) it's a half-hour long, and B) we might be the only people laughing," he recalled.

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So they had to scale back the gags in order to "get to the time heist", McFeely added, and it meant that Rhodey's dig had to go.

And by not highlighting previous plot holes, the writers hoped that it would mean fans wouldn't pay too close attention to the time heist.

"There's other things where frankly if we looked too hard at certain things, you'd realise the stones are in multiple places. For instance, the Tesseract is in a few spots, including in Asgard when they go to get the Aether. It's over there, down the hall," Markus explained.

"It took a little bit of scaling back on the jokes to make the movie work."

Avengers: Endgame and almost all of the other MCU movies are available to watch on Disney+.

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