Captain America's MCU Story Explained

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has now been around for more than a decade and spanned roughly two dozen different films starring dozens of characters on various worlds and in various time periods. It's an immensely complex shared universe full of stories — but even amid all that complexity, the story of Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, is particularly complicated. 

Sure, Cap's story starts simply enough. He's a kid from Brooklyn who wants to do good in the world and keeps volunteering to join the army, but then he gets drafted into a program that makes him a super soldier, tangles with HYDRA, and then things get really complicated when he's frozen in ice for nearly 70 years. 

As the resident man out of time in the Avengers, Steve Rogers brings a unique perspective and a very different experience to the team as a whole, an experience that gets even more complex when you factor in his long-lost friend who's a brainwashed assassin, his decision to form a splinter team of Avengers, and the whole time travel thing. To make sense of it all, here's Captain America's whole twisty MCU story, explained.

Steve Rogers was driven back to New York City to take part in the Project Rebirth procedure under Erskine's supervision. The night before, Erskine warned him of previous attempts that hadn't gone well, including one on a German officer named Johann Schmidt who was at that very moment pursuing his own ambitions in Europe as the leader of the fascist organization known as HYDRA. Though extremely painful, Rogers' version of the procedure went smoothly; he emerged with a dramatic increase in height and muscle mass, boasting enhanced abilities and free of his previous chronic illnesses. 

Rogers' first encounter with HYDRA sadly arrived just moments after the procedure, as a HYDRA agent snuck into the room and gunned down Erskine. Steve was able to pursue and catch the agent, but he committed suicide before he could be questioned. 

Erskine's death changed the course of the SSR and Project Rebirth, as his formula apparently died with him. With only one super soldier at their disposal, the U.S. government pressed Steve Rogers into service immediately — but it wasn't the kind of service he wanted.

By 1945, Captain America and his "Howlin' Commandos" had succeeded in helping turn the tide of the war, but it came at great cost. During a mission to capture the Red Skull's chief aide Arnim Zola, Bucky fell to his apparent death, leaving Steve and the rest of the Commandos to gain the location of HYDRA's final stronghold from Zola. 

Steve then discovered Red Skull's endgame. Using a powerful artifact called the Tesseract (later revealed as an Infinity Stone), he engineered weapons of mass destruction which he planned to drop on America with the help of a long-distance bomber. Steve snuck onboard the plane and, in the ensuing confrontation, Red Skull seemingly died when the unshielded Tesseract pulled him through a wormhole. The Tesseract then fell into the ocean, to later be recovered by Howard Stark. 

With HYDRA defeated, Steve was left alone on the damaged plane, and realized he couldn't risk landing it because there was a chance the weapons would detonate and kill countless civilians. While radioing with Peggy — who he'd recently shared a first kiss with — Steve revealed his intention to crash the plane into the ocean and sacrifice himself. So, near the end of World War II, Steve Rogers flew a plane into the Arctic Ocean and passed into legend, becoming an American hero who, as far as the rest of the world knew, gave his life to save countless others.

In 2012, Rogers was called back into action when the resurfaced Tesseract, which had been in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody for years, fell into the hands of Loki, who planned to use it to open a wormhole and summon an alien army to Earth. At Fury's urging and working alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and Captain America superfan Phil Coulson, Steve teamed up with Tony Stark/Iron Man, Bruce Banner/the Hulk, Thor, and S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow and Clint Barton/Hawkeye to form the Avengers. 

The team's relationship was rocky at first amid a clash of personalities, but Coulson's death at Loki's hand galvanized them, and Steve in particular took point as a field captain for the group. When Loki used Stark Tower to open his wormhole over New York City, the Avengers took to the streets to fight the ensuing Chitauri invasion, with Steve often taking point in getting civilians away from danger. In the chaos, the World Security Council opted to bomb New York rather than risk the invasion spreading, but Stark was able to divert the missile while Romanoff closed the wormhole. After Stark narrowly escaped death, the Avengers took Loki and the Tesseract into custody, sending both back to Asgard with Thor. Their mission complete, the Avengers went their separate ways, and Steve became a full-time S.H.I.E.L.D. field operative.

With S.H.I.E.L.D. in ruins following the HYDRA discovery, Rogers re-teamed with the Avengers to take out the remaining HYDRA cells now under the command of Baron Wolfgang von Strucker. While infiltrating the last HYDRA stronghold in Europe, the team discovered two new metahumans — Pietro and Wanda Maximoff — who'd gained their abilities through Strucker's experiments. 

After defeating Strucker, the Avengers faced a new threat when Stark's experimental AI technology known as Ultron gained sentience and began formulating a plan to wipe out humanity. After Ultron crippled the Avengers in a fight, a rift formed between Stark and Rogers as Steve questioned Tony's motives in trying to build "a suit of armor around the world." 

The Avengers regrouped in Sokovia, where Ultron attempted to launch an entire city into the sky before dropping it back to Earth like an asteroid. With the help of the Maximoffs and Ultron's own android creation Vision, and with Rogers again acting as field commander, the team was able to defeat Ultron's robotic army and prevent the city from impacting Earth, losing Pietro in the process. 

With Ultron defeated, the original Avengers went their separate ways, so much so that Hulk fled the planet in a Quinjet. Rogers took command at the team's new upstate New York facility, and prepared to train a new team of Avengers with Romanoff including Wanda, Sam, James "Rhodey" Rhodes/War Machine, and Vision.

More than a year passed as Steve and his team continued to carry out covert operations around the world, but their time in hiding was interrupted when they had to rescue Wanda and Vision (the pair were quietly dating at the time) from a pair of alien invaders in Scotland. This was followed by a call from a returned Bruce Banner, who revealed to Steve that Thanos had begun his final push for the Infinity Stones, threatening all life in the universe. Vision, who held the Mind Stone in his head, offered his life if it meant the stone would be destroyed and Thanos would be stopped, but Steve refused. 

While Tony carried out his own fight with Thanos off-planet, Steve called in a favor to King T'Challa of Wakanda, and the two prepared for a pitched battle in the tiny African nation. Thanos' army arrived in a push to get the Mind Stone, and Steve led the charge to hold them off while Wakandan scientist Shuri tried to remove the Stone from Vision so it could be destroyed. Though Thor, Groot, and Rocket arrived to reinforce their fight, Thanos himself later appeared to take the Stone. Wanda used her power to destroy it, but Thanos used the Time Stone to rewind time and take the Mind Stone from Vision's head. Though Thor nearly killed Thanos, Thanos snapped his fingers wielding all six Infinity Stones, wiping out half of all life in the universe.

Using Pym Particles as their time travel fuel, the Avengers split into teams to journey back to previous encounters with the Infinity Stones in order to steal them and form a Gauntlet of their own that would undo Thanos' snap. Steve journeyed with Stark, Banner, and Lang to New York in 2012, and successfully recovered the Mind Stone after a battle with his own past self. When the Space Stone was lost after it fell into Loki's hands, Tony and Steve launched an unplanned journey to 1970 New Jersey to recover it at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. While there, Steve stole Pym Particles to facilitate the trip home. 

Though Natasha was lost during her mission to capture the Mind Stone, the Avengers succeeded in getting all six Infinity Stones, and Banner (now in permanent Hulk form) snapped to undo the decimation. It worked, but moments later a past version of Thanos arrived, having learned of the Avengers' plan via Nebula's memory banks. A battle ensued in upstate New York, and at one point Steve was the last soldier standing. He proved himself worthy of wielding Mjolnir and led the reformed Avengers in a massive fight which culminated in Tony sacrificing himself by wielding the Stones and using them to kill Thanos and his entire army, ending the Infinity War once and for all.

Avengers: Endgame, and by extension Steve Rogers himself, doesn't shed a lot of light on what exactly Steve did with the intervening decades he finally got to spend time in after previously "living" through them while frozen in ice. That's left a lot of room for speculation by fans, and the most prominent question is whether he actually created an alternate timeline by refusing to return to the present. Apparently, the answer to that is no. 

"We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline," Endgame co-writer Christopher Markus said. 

That just means there were two versions of Steve Rogers who existed between the 1940s and the 2020s, though one of them spent most of that time frozen. It's quite possible, then, that Steve is now the father of Peggy's children who were referenced in past MCU installments, and it's also possible those children have some super soldier blood. Whether that adds to Steve Rogers' legacy in the future remains to be seen.