That was awesome!
The cheers in the theater every time I saw it when they played the song contradict your assertion.
Just to elaborate I can’t find a calculator that gives me .5^7000 as being anything other than zero, let alone .5^7,000,000,000. The odds are less than one in the number of particles in the universe, let alone the number of planets.
Appeal to the masses? Not much of an argument. No one cheered when I saw it.
I said it was my opinion. And I stand by it.
Right. If a planet only had thirty people on it, the chances of them all being snapped (or none of them) is already only one in a billion. Every time you add ten more people, the odds change by a factor of a thousand.
But you’re still looking at one planet in isolation.
Think about going and buying a Powerball ticket. The chance that you have just made yourself a hundred-millionaire is virtually nil. The chance that someone, out of the many millions of people who bought one, won the grand prize is fairly high.
But sure: a planet losing all its population or losing none of it is low. Would you concede that with billions of planets out there, a few of them will lose <1% or >99% of their population?
I don’t think you realize how low these odds are. They make the powerball look like a sure thing. The odds of winning powerball are about one in 300 million. 700 people getting all snapped is about 1 in 10^211. We don’t even have a name for that number. The number of particles in the universe is estimated at 10^86. And the odds don’t change much if you allow less than 1 percent of the population to go unsnapped. 7 billion choose 70 million times zero is still zero.
Appeal to the masses is how movies make money.
No, unless we’re talking about planets with any significant population.
The relevant mathematical model is a binomial distribution. The relevant variables are N (number of trials) and p (probability of success on each trial).
The mean (average) number of successes is, obviously, N * p.
The standard deviation of the number of successes (a measure of how much individual trials scatter around the average) is the square root of (N * p * (1-p)).
If N is large, the distribution of individual trials resembles the standard bell curve.
Armed with this knowledge, let’s consider the case of a bunch of planets with 400 inhabitants each. The mean number of dustings on each planet will be 200; the standard deviation will be SQRT(400 * 0.5 * 0.5) = SQRT(100) = 10.
Having 100 dustings or less, or having 300 dustings or more, would be a variation of at least 100 – 10 standard deviations – from the mean. That is insanely improbable, to the point that it’s unlikely even given billions of trials. It turns out that the probability that the figure will be between 175 and 225 (i.e. no more than 25, or 2.5 standard deviations, from the mean) is 0.9938.
Geez, did the math scare people off? 
Anyway, it holds up on second viewing. And I saw Howard the Duck!
Can’t he just go back and borrow a back-in-the-day Time Stone for as long as he needs, so long as it eventually gets replaced a moment after he walked off with it?
Loved it, but my favorite MCU movie is still the first Avengers film, due in no small part to how funny it is.
For sure.
I saw Endgame this weekend and, in isolation, it’s solid. I enjoyed almost all of it, it didn’t feel like three hours, and as long as you don’t think too hard about the time travel (too late for most folks in this thread, natch) the plot is complex but clear with a satisfying conclusion. And you don’t go to these kinds of movies for great acting, but even most of that was pretty darn good, too.
But in context as the final installment of a twenty-something movie universe-building project, I think it’s an astonishing achievement. There are so, so, so many ways it could have gone all wrong (14 million ways? Maybe not quite that many 
), but they actually managed to close out this huge arc in an extremely satisfying way, including dozens of characters and plot points across a couple dozen films. Given Hollywood tendencies, it should have been a disaster and I really can’t believe it’s as good as it is.
Credit to the team at Marvel for bringing it all together.
I give them massive credit. I compare the MCU to the Star Wars saga. That franchise keeps making movies but it hasn’t introduced any new ideas since 1980. The MCU, on the other hand, has worked hard on keeping itself fresh by moving in new directions.
So true. Although “Rogue One” was well done IMO.
It was a decent movie (above average for the franchise) but what did it add to the series? It told us that the rebel alliance got hold of the plans for the Death Star. I knew that back in 1977.
Endgame showed us something we haven’t seen before in its series; how the heroes deal with a catastrophic defeat. It added something new to the story.
Huh? It’s clear regardless of whatever Thanos said, that half of life was humanoid life. The snap occurred in a forested area. Did half the trees poof? No.
Tony didn’t say what he wanted to happen before he did his snap. He just willed it. It’s not verbal.
For all the talk of Captain Marvel being overpowered/underused, it increasingly strikes me that the guys who could have done so much more are Strange, Wong and all the other guys who can make a portal between any two points in space.
Too many enemies in the battlefield? Now they’re in the Marianas Trench.
Too much heavy ordnance raining down from those ships? Now those ships are shooting themselves out the sky.
Thanos where you don’t want him to be? Now he’s back on Titan.
Thanos got his hands? Nope, as we have literally seen in Infinity War, portals can be used to amputate.
Want to keep the Infinity Gauntlet away from Thanos if, for some reason, you can’t teleport him? Hey, now it’s in Australia. Now it’s in Nepal. Now it’s in Siberia. Heck, need to get across the battlefield really, really quickly to a specific place? Guess what?
Ocean about to burst in? Rather than stand around making it swirl prettily and making cryptic gestures to Iron Man, why not open one large portal for intake, a much smaller outlet and hey, you’ve got yourself a high pressure water cannon.
So many options, so little done.
Then what was the point of that whole “the birds are back” scene after the unsnapping?