With Avengers: Infinity War fast approaching, many speculative eyes are looking towards the future of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe with eager anticipation. One thing we do know about life after Thanos is that Captain Marvel (2019) will introduce us to the evil, shapeshifting Skrulls. However, is it possible that the Skrulls have been in red and gold armour this whole time?
A little bit of backstory. In the Marvel Comics universe, from which Kevin Fiege’s tapestry of movies draw their inspiration, the Skrulls are a race of alien changelings who abduct Earth’s mightiest heroes and take on their form and personalities to infiltrate the planet to orchestrate its take over. One of the best features of the Skrulls is that they can show up at any time, and anybody could potentially be a Skrull. In 2007 during the legendary Secret Invasion storyline, it was revealed to us that Daredevil’s beloved Elektra had secretly been a Skrull informant. Many believe that the Secret Invasion story will be the bedrock for Avengers 4. Well, I have the wacky theory that in the MCU, the Skrull is Iron Man himself, Tony Stark.
I’ll probably be eating my hat down the line, but at the moment I’ve put together a substantial amount of evidence in my tinfoil covered mind that points to Robert Downey Jr.’s Stark is secretly a shapeshifting alien.
The first thing I’d like to point out is that the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron are almost entirely Tony Stark’s fault. He built a killer robot and then when things didn’t turn out so well he wanted to build another! What if Tony was working against The Avengers the whole time? Perhaps he wanted to weaken the planet so that the Skrulls could come in take over the place with as little opposition as possible.
I point to the sudden shift in Tony Stark’s ideology between his solo Iron Man films and his role in Captain America: Civil War. Now, one could point to Tony as having a little thing called character development as a reason for this change, but I’m of the mind that maybe, just maybe, it’s the Skrull inside of him influencing this. Let’s take a look.
In Iron Man 2, Mr. Stark stands before congress and refuses to hand over control of the Iron Man suit to the US government, proudly declared “I’ve privatised world peace”.
To the contrary, in Captain America: Civil War, Tony is advocating that not just he, but a whole team of Avengers submit themselves to the United Nations, effectively putting command of the Avengers into the hands of politicians. Well, politicians would be the first people the Skrulls would become, wouldn’t they? This comes not long after the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where it’s unveiled that the highest echelons of power on the planet had been infiltrated by Hydra!
This is quite the turnaround, but what happens next? Tony does not act responsibly, and attempts to apprehend his own allies violently. Perhaps Tony was instructed to take out the opposition. Remember that Ant-Man, Falcon, Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye end up imprisoned once Iron Man apprehends them. A ready-made super prison, might I add.
Tony becomes so fixated on getting Steve Rogers to sign these Sokovia Accords that he attempts to enforce them to by callously roping a teenage boy into his team to fight against trained assassins, super soldiers and a reality warping enchantress. (In addition, said teenage boy hadn’t signed the Accords that Stark was so hell-bent on enforcing). Bare in mind that Tony’s alleged guilt over Sokovia was triggered by the death of a young man not much older than Peter Parker. Is this the behaviour of a superhero? One could say he’s like a man possessed!
If Tony was really signing up to the Sokovia Accords to undo the damage he did with Ultron, why then was he perfectly fine with completely trashing an airport? I think there’s more to this than meets the eye.
In the opening scenes of Civil War, Tony is making a presentation on behalf of his Stark Foundation. When his girlfriend Pepper Potts’ absence is brought up, Tony looks not upset about his girlfriend breaking up with him, but overcome with some profound secretive confusion. Take another look at the scene with that in mind.
(If you really want to get conspiratorial, what if Tony’s memory simulator is some kind of Skrull technology to help its agents recreate their stolen personalities…?)
Then alarmingly, in Spider-Man: Homecoming – the next movie in the continuity – we are reunited with Pepper Potts, and guess what? She too is behaving differently from how she usually acts and she also is perfectly okay with roping a boy too young to buy a beer into the most dangerous team in the world. Not only is Pepper acting strangely affectionate for somebody who recently had broken up with her boyfriend because he unleashed a killer robot on the planet (as Tony claims in Civil War), we’re led to assume that she accepts his marriage proposal!
I’m probably wrong about all of this, but it’s something that’s come to my mind recently. I think it’ll be a lot of fun once the Skrull speculation really kicks in after Infinity War, but for now, we’ll just have to wait and see!
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