Avengers: Endgame fans are trying to figure out what Tony Stark's 'I love you 3000' line actually meant

Warning: Massive Avengers: Endgame spoilers ahead so if you haven't seen the film, what have you been doing and don't read anymore if you don't want the film ruined.

Now that you've all been exhilarated and left emotionally devastated by Avengers: Endgame and then spent the following days dissecting everything that happened you'll probably think that there is nothing left to talk about.

However, one line in the film did leave fans with a few questions...

After being rescued from space by Captain Marvel and returning to Earth, Tony Stark decides to leave the superhero life behind, settle down and start a family with Pepper Potts.

In the five years after Thanos's snap and the moment where Ant-Man returns from the quantum realm and convinces the Avengers that time-travel is the best way to stop half of life from dying, Tony and Pepper have a daughter called Morgan.

Rather than say "I love you," Tony displays his unique brand of wit by repeatedly telling her "I love you 3000," which on the surface appeared to be a cute line that demonstrated his intellectual connection to Morgan, that would culminate in an emotional pay-off.

However, was there something else to this line that Marvel's producers were hiding right under our noses?

A theory has begun to circulate between Marvel fans that suggests that if you add all the minutes of the movies up, including the forthcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home, then the total run time is 3000 minutes.

If this is true it's pretty unbelievable that Marvel would make 22 films to run to a specific line just to fit it in with one line for one movie.

Some have contested this claim, with the official run time of a handful being slightly longer than what has been suggested.

In addition, the run time for Far From Home hasn't been released yet, so that would appear to be a stab-in-the-dark but fun nonetheless.

However, the explanation behind the line appears to be even simpler.

In a recent press conference featuring the Endgame screenwriters, Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely, the duo revealed that 'I love you 3000' is actually something that Robert Downey Jr's real-life children say to him.

Once they learnt that they decided to add it into the movie's script, changing the original line from "I love you tons" with it also serving as a nice little nod to the actor who appears to have bowed out of the franchise for good.

Either way, we love you 3000 Robert Downey Jr.

HT Daily Dot