In the battle against Thanos, the day was ultimately won by a tiny, unlikely hero. No, not that one, but you're close.

During a spoiler filled interview with a Chinese website, Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo let slip the true hero of the film, though if you're anything like us, it had probably already crossed your mind that the Avengers victory would never have been possible if not for... a random mouse.

Of course, the key to the Avengers' eventual victory was actually Scott Lang. He was last seen in the post-credits scene for Ant-Man and the Wasp, stranded in the Quantum Realm after Hank Pym, Janet Van Dyne, and Hope Van Dyne… who were to pull him out once he was finished collecting "healing particles" for their new friend Ghost… were all dusted before they could throw the switch and bring Scott back.

At the start of Endgame, we learn that during the five years since the Snappening, the van in which the Quantum Tunnel was housed had been sitting in a rodent-infested storage. In a 14-million-to-one shot, one of those rodents just happened to crawl across the exact right spot on the Tunnel's control panel, zapping Scott back into the world.

This raises the question: if not for that mouse, would Thanos have won? If it would have crawled across a different portion of the panel, even, would the Avengers have been hosed? According to Russo, the answer is yes.

That's… just insane. Yes, the Avengers' plan to reverse the Decimation was a convoluted one, with different teams traveling to different time periods in order to pre-emptively acquire all six Infinity Stones before Thanos could get his hands on them. It was also fraught with complications: Tony Stark and Steve Rogers failed to grab the Tesseract during the Battle of New York, necessitating a slight detour to 1970; like Gamora before her, Black Widow was forced to give her life in exchange for the Soul Stone; and 2014 Thanos figured out the whole plan due to Nebula's incursion into that period, almost managing to thwart our heroes by sending the still-villainous past version of Nebula to the present as a mole.

But since we know that Doctor Strange saw the only outcome that resulted in victory during his future-viewing party on Titan during Avengers: Infinity War, we know that somehow, it all played out exactly like it was supposed to… and that included the contribution of that low-down, dirty mouse. Think about what must have been going through Doctor Strange's mind when he handed the Time Stone over to Thanos, knowing that the future of the universe depended on the random wanderings of a mouse five years in the future. Keep watching the video to find out who Joe Russo reveals who the true hero of Endgame is!

#Avengers#AvengersEndgame#Endgame