In Avengers Infinity War, Doctor Strange used the Time Stone to view all 14,000,605 possible outcomes of the on-coming conflict with Thanos. The Sorcerer Supreme discovered that there was only one, Avengers Endgame, in which they succeeded. To orchestrate it, the wizard willingly traded the Time Stone for Iron Man’s life so that Tony Stark could die sacrificially in five years time after both Thanos’ Snap and Hulk’s reverse one.

But now a popular new fan theory argues that there’s more than one way to win other than just the Endgame, but Doctor Strange was concerned that the TVA would show up and prune the timeline.

Reddit user chejordanxxx writes: “Doctor Strange told them, there’s 14,000,605 timelines that he has seen using the Time Stone.

“But there’s only one way to ‘win’. To be fair, there’s plenty of ways they can defeat Thanos.

“Doctor Strange didn’t lie, but the reason why this alternate scenario won’t happen [is] because (spoiler alert from Loki): TVA keep pruning/resetting those timelines.”

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They continued in their upvoted comment: “He said he saw 14 million realities and out of those 14 million, there was only one that they won in.

“That doesn’t remove the possibility that there are more possible realities that they could’ve won in, rather that it took Strange 14 million tries to find the first one.

“This possibly also only includes the realities where Strange survives, but this is only speculat[ion] on my part. There’s probably more where they could win but Strange doesn’t know that because he died before knowing the outcome.”

Avengers Endgame is streaming on Disney+.

READ THE FULL REDDIT THEORY HERE