Or, more accurately, the fact that he said the Avengers only won once can’t be taken as evidence about what he really saw.

This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Doctor Strange told the heroes that he used the Time Stone to look into 14,000,605 futures, and saw only one future where they won.

He spent the rest of the two movies steering events to play out as he saw them in this one future.

Therefore, while Strange was using the Time Stone, he must have taken the exact same actions, including telling the Avengers that there was only one way to win.

Strange telling the heroes (especially Tony Stark) that they only won in one future was a critical element of his plan—the plan only worked because he said that.

But when he played out this scenario using the Time Stone, he couldn’t have known at that point that there was only one way to win, because he hadn’t run the scenarios yet.

So what actually happened was:

1. In one of the possible futures, Doctor Strange told Tony that there was only one way to win, even though Strange didn’t yet know whether that was true.
2. This worked, and Thanos was defeated.
3. In real life, Doctor Strange replicated this plan.

It could be true that this was the only future where they won. But when Doctor Strange said it’s the only future where they won, that statement was not attached to truth in any way. The reason he said it wasn’t that it was true; it was that he needed to say it for the Avengers to win.

So, in the end¹, we have no idea whether it’s true.

Edited 2025-07-26 to change “out” in the title from capital to lower case. I thought “out” was supposed to be capitalized but after writing it, it seemed weird to me, so I did some research. “Out” is normally an adverb, but in this sentence, “out of” functions as a preposition, and prepositions should be lower case. The Chicago Manual of Style says “out of” should be lower case so I changed my title. But apparently this is a thorny issue, with the Chicago guide originally giving incorrect guidance, and then they updated it after some readers wrote in to disagree. (The thing they got wrong wasn’t directly relevant to my title, it was about using “out of” in a different context.) So if they can get it wrong then I don’t feel too bad about getting it wrong myself.

Posted on Jul 25, 2025

Notes