It's been exactly three months since The Avengers: Infinity War hit theaters and turned the whole Marvel fan community upside-down. Practically everyone who's ever seen a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is itching for next summer's release of Avengers 4, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo are doing everything in their power to keep the details about it under wraps until then. They don't even want to announce the film's title yet because they say it might spoil the plot. If the Infinity Gauntlet was powered by Avengers 4 details instead of the six Infinity Stones, the universe would still be safe from Thanos.
Because of this, countless fan theories have been popping up all over the internet in the past three months. Most of them center around characters who died in Infinity War and ways that they could come back to life, and while a lot of those deaths occurred when Thanos snapped his fingers with the Infinity Gauntlet to wipe out half the universe, some deaths occurred before that. These are the trickier ones to theorize about since they don't seem as easily reversible as the ones caused by the Snap. However, more and more fans are starting to look at some of these deaths from a new angle: that those characters aren't actually dead.
I could spend days researching and constructing my own theories about every "dead" character, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just talk about three of the more likely ones to turn up alive in Avengers 4.
There isn't too much to say about this character, mainly because there isn't too much to say about his role in Infinity War. All we see is a brief scene of Thanos threatening him for the location of the Reality Stone, then a reveal that it was all just an illusion cast by the Mad Titan to draw the heroes out of their hiding places. The obvious assumption is that Thanos killed the Collector offscreen shortly before this scene occurred, but there are reasons to think that he didn't.
For starters, the MCU doesn't make a habit of killing notable characters offscreen. The only one that comes to mind is Sif from the Thor film series, who's been absent since The Dark World and was said in interviews to have died from the Snap. This lack of closure was mainly due to Jaime Alexander not being available to reprise her role though, and that clearly wasn't the issue with Beniccio Del Toro. The MCU is one of the biggest film franchises in history; if the screenwriters don't have enough time in one film to properly kill off a character and the actor is still under contract, they can probably afford to save that death for another film rather than just having it happen offscreen.
Second, let's consider the illusion that Thanos cast of himself threatening the Collector. He didn't kill the Collector at the end of the illusion, and their conversation throughout it was very detailed and true to the Collector's character. It's possible that Thanos was reenacting what actually happened when he confronted the Collector earlier, rather than fabricating a conversation off the top of his head. It stands to reason then that just like in his illusion, he didn't kill the Collector in real life. Thanos is a surprisingly merciful supervillain, so if the Collector gave him the Reality Stone without too much resistance, Thanos probably spared him.
The strongest piece of evidence though comes from this piece of artwork, which shows the Collector playing a board game with his brother the Grandmaster:
This is an official piece of artwork created by Marvel Studios for a Guardians of the Galaxy attraction in Disneyland, and it's prompted Studio President Kevin Feige to express interest in featuring the two characters together in a future film. Granted, such a scene could end up being a flashback that takes place prior to Infinity War, but it still leaves the door wide open for the Collector to be alive. Bottom line, his character still has a chance of turning up alive since we never actually saw him die.
Okay, physically she is quite dead, but I think she's getting better.
Unlike the other pre-Snap deaths in Infinity War, Gamora's had a very spiritual element to it. Thanos killed her as part of a ritual to obtain the Soul Stone, an Infinity Stone with the power to control life and death. Her demise is directly tied to the Soul Stone, and the Soul Stone was the stone responsible for killing half the universe when Thanos snapped his fingers.
That was why he had a vision of Gamora in an orange-tinted realm right after he caused the Snap. Her appearance wasn't presented as a hallucination brought on by his guilt over killing her. It was presented as the real Gamora communicating with him in spirit. She didn't know what had happened until Thanos admitted it to her, and the scenery being orange (the same color same the Soul Stone) implied that her spirit was trapped inside of the stone. Thanos using the Soul Stone to such a huge capacity was probably what triggered Gamora's sudden appearance in the first place.
The Soul Stone is the only Infinity Stone shown in the movies to have any kind of rule set attached to it. You can't just snatch it up and use it like you can with the other five; certain actions have to be taken to prove that you're worthy to use it. You have to follow the rules in order for it to function properly. Because of this, it's entirely possible that an improper use or even a forfeiture of the Soul Stone could cause it to reverse the sacrifice that was made to obtain it and then render the stone unusable once more. This could mean a resurrection for Gamora in the near future.
As for behind-the-scenes evidence, the waters are a little muddier now than they were three months ago. Zoe Saldana is still active on the MCU publicity scene even though Infinity War's theatrical run is over, and Guardians of the Galaxy Director James Gunn has said that Gamora will have a "significant role" in the next film of that series. However, Gunn's recent firing from the project could undo a lot of his story ideas. This might not affect the Guardians characters too much though. Marvel Studios plans their films pretty far in advance, and the timeline of the MCU is so intricate and interwoven now that it would be very difficult to scrap story ideas. If the studio did that, it could cause a butterfly effect that would drastically alter their plans for a lot of future films.
Overall, I still think it's safe to assume that Gamora will come back to life. It's just what she'll do afterwards that's foggy.
I know, I wrote that huge two-part eulogy for him when Infinity War first came out and now I don't even think he's really dead. I still stand by most of what I said in my "Looking Back On Loki" essay, and to be perfectly frank, a part of me still likes to think that the God of Mischief really did meet his poetically poignant end in the first scene of Infinity War. That doesn't change the fact though that the events leading up to his death look EXTREMELY suspicious now.
Here's a rundown of what happens: Thor and Loki are cornered by Thanos, Loki stalls for time — promising Thor that "The sun will shine on us again" — and then he tackles Thor out of the way as the Hulk comes crashing into Thanos. The Hulk and Thanos have a brutal fistfight for several minutes, but not once does the scene ever cut away to Thor and Loki to show us what they're doing. This is odd enough, but what's even more odd is that Thor eventually shows up in the middle of the Hulk and Thanos's fistfight by himself. What happened to Loki?
There's still no sign of the God of Mischief even when Thanos apprehends Thor and kills Heimdall. It's not until Thanos is just about to make his exit that Loki shows up again, and when he does, he almost appears to step right out of nowhere. He tries to kill Thanos, seeming to use the bare minimum of his powers, and then his trick backfires and Thanos appears to kill him. This scene raises so many questions that it gets harder and harder to take at face value every time I watch it.
First of all, Loki's faked his death before in the MCU, and we haven't always gotten a clear explanation of how he did it. We still don't know exactly how he survived his fight with Kurse in The Dark World, so he could very well have survived against Thanos. For all we know, the person that Thanos appeared to kill could have just been a random dead Asgardian that Loki possessed and then projected his appearance onto from a safe distance away. We've seen him do both of those things to some extent before, even without the use of his scepter.
Some might say that these theories are all moot, since Tom Hiddleston has done multiple interviews saying that his time playing Loki is over and that Loki isn't coming back to life in Avengers 4. However, Marvel Studios has a history of releasing bogus interviews to subvert fan expectations. Just look at Ben Kingsley's interviews about playing the Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Those were absolutely meant to be misleading, at least at the time when they first came out. Heck, the Russo Brothers themselves have insisted that Spider-Man and Black Panther's deaths in Infinity War are permanent, and yet both of those characters already have sequels to their own standalone films in the works.
Also, the interviews of Tom Hiddleston saying that his time playing Loki is over are only half deceptive; Avengers 4 is the last film on his contract, not Infinity War, but it just so happens that he was done shooting his scenes for Avengers 4 by the time that Infinity War opened in theaters. Technically there's nothing inaccurate about anything he said in those interviews, but having them come out right after we saw Loki die in a new movie does seem like we're being set up to have the wrong idea.
This is all a prime example of where things stand with the MCU these days. The franchise is so huge, the stakes are so high, and the studio has grown so clever with both its writing and its marketing that we have almost no way of predicting what's going to happen in their films anymore. Some fans may find all of this secrecy and uncertainty maddening, some may find it exhilarating, and some probably take it as even more of a challenge to try and figure out what will happen next. Whatever the case, we'll all probably be more and more eager to see these movies with each passing phase. Not many franchises can stay this engaging after ten years and twenty movies.
And if Marvel Studios has been throwing us more of these curve balls than they've needed to, then mischief managed, I suppose.
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