WARNING: It’s been a month, but just in case, this article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
Toward the end of the climactic final battle in Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark manages to sneak the Infinity Stones away from Thanos and use them to dust the Mad Titan and his invading army. It’s a helluva way to end a three-hour film, let alone a character arc that actor Robert Downey Jr. has been crafting for just over a decade, but in the end, the good guys win. After that, everyone — the team members who surviving Infinity War‘s dusting and those who were brought back — attends Iron Man’s funeral.
It’s an impressive shot, as the camera pans from the front of the group, where Pepper Potts and Morgan Stark have just released a memorial into the family’s pond, to the back of it, where Nick Fury stands in attendance. Just about everyone who’s played a hero in a Marvel Studios movie is there. Or are they? Kevin Feige and company have used digital trickery before to insert performers into big group scenes. Surely such an occasion and a central character’s funeral would be no different… right?
Wrong, as a “family portrait” from Karen Gillan, who plays Nebula, has proven. The photo, which she posted to Twitter late Saturday, shows everyone — and I mean everyone — in actual, physical attendance.
Family portrait pic.twitter.com/36XvA2B81r
— Karen Gillan (@karengillan) May 25, 2019
For all we know, the camera and camera crane in the background could be an homage to Stark’s fan-favorite robot helper, Dum-E.