One of the Russo brothers confirmed in an interview that Spider-Man: Homecoming got the chronology wrong and Infinity War confirmed that it has been six years since The Avengers and two years since Civil War.
I kinda wonder if little discrepancies like this are going to be a way for Marvel to mildly hold the movies that they make for Sony at arm's length if the deal ever goes sour.
Although, my thinking at the time was that adding time between
The Avengers &
Spider-Man: Homecoming was their way of compensating for the compressed timeline between
Iron Man &
The Avengers. IRL, there was a 4 year gap between
Iron Man &
The Avengers. In-universe, it's probably less than 2 years.
Iron Man 2 established that the Stark Expo began about 6 months after Tony Stark revealed his secret identity at the end of
Iron Man. Iron Man 2 also showed Coulson leaving for New Mexico, which immediately lead into the events of
Thor. Then, in
The Avengers, Nick Fury referred to the events of
Thor "a year ago."
I believe Stark put his neuroses to rest in Iron Man 3, that was one of the central themes of that movie and i liked it very much to seea superhero actually having to deal with PTSD.
While Tony Stark no longer freezes up and has panic attacks like he did in
Iron Man 3, I think he's still only barely keeping it together. He's just expressing it differently. While he's too much of a control freak to just walk away entirely, we've already seen a couple attempts by him to abdicate the responsibility for protecting the world, first by creating Ultron and then by putting the U.N. in charge with the Sokovia Accords.
Precisely for this reason and the extreme shock value i believe it is time for Iron Man to die. Thanos already killed some fan favorites like Loki but there is no better way to raise the stakes and actually make people care about the events than to kill major characters. Killing half the universe is horrible on the factual side but we don't care about an alien several galaxies away, hell we don't even care about the regular humans we see vanishing in the Fury/Hill scene at the end of the movie but sacrificing main and extremely popular characters like Iron Man?
I'm not sure I could handle that. Captain America & Thor are soldiers. Dying on some nameless hill to save the world is what they signed up for. Tony never asked for any of this. He was cursed with genius, which lead to him creating as many problems as he fixed. I really hope that Tony is able to find some peace, even though I'm not sure he's psychologically capable of that. And Pepper deserves better than for Tony to die through writer fiat.
I will say the one thing that, to me, would justify killing off Tony Stark is if it turns out that Pepper is one of the ones who died in the Snap. After all of his near-brushes with death, dying to save the world feels pointless & hollow. Dying to save Pepper would be making the best out of the crappy hand that fate has dealt him.
As far as the other characters who may live or die in the next movie, I figure Cap is a goner because Bucky redeeming himself by taking on the mantle is what needs to happen next. And I think Thor is going to die because they've spent the last few movies gradually stripping away everything that he has to live for. I'm flipping a coin on Bruce Banner. I get the sense that Marvel may have run out of ideas for him.