Avengers: The Hidden Meaning Behind That Final Endgame Song Coffin Dance Song Name

Avengers: Endgame is such a carefully guarded property that even the film’s title was kept a secret until the last possible moment. There are so many surprises involved in the final fight between the original Avengers team and the big purple menace Thanos that even songs can be considered a spoiler. So go ahead and scoot if you don’t want to know how it all ends.

Despite the secrecy around this project, many fans of the Avengers movies had guessed that if this were indeed Chris Evans’s last film as Captain America, the movie had to end—somehow—with him dancing in the arms of his W.W. II-era flame, Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell. (The real world is far too grim for us to handle some sad downer of a death for Cap.) Whether the dance happened in some other dimension or, as it turned out, thanks to time travel, no one knew. But Peggy and Cap’s big date is a thread that’s been woven through so many movies, there was no way the filmmakers could resist.

What most fans didn’t know, though, is which heart-tugging song would play Cap out to his happily ever after. We’ll quickly run through why this dance was such an inevitability before getting to the added meaning of the 1945 wartime hit that serenades Cap and Peggy: “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.”

The dance between Cap and Peg was set up early in his story arc, in Captain America: The First Avenger—even before he became America’s favorite beefcake. A skinny Steve Rogers was already impressing Ms. Carter when he told her that “women aren’t exactly lining up to dance with a guy they might step on.”

Their planned dance is also the subject of their David Hinckley eulogized her by writing about her most famous tune: “Those lyrics were simple and sentimental [. . .] they weren’t a holler of joy. They were more pensive, almost melancholy. It had been a long, long war.”