'Avengers: Infinity War' - Here Are The Characters We Think Are Safe

Russ Burlingame

03/21/2018 07:42 am EDT

There are portents of doom hanging over Avengers: Infinity War.

Ten years after the Marvel Cinematic Universe sprang into exuberant existence with Samuel L. Jackson's cameo at the end of Iron Man, the filmmakers behind it are promising that not every beloved superhero will make it out of Infinity War alive -- and fans, as they do, have responded with numerous theories as to who might be the one(s) to go.

That is a fairly dour, dire exercise, though, and we thought it might be a little more fun -- and equally revealing, really -- to look at the characters we figure to be safe.

By and large, they are safe because they have sequels coming up (although there might be other reasons, too). Ultimately, though, this list is almost as big as the list of potential casualties -- and a lot less full of reasons why your favorite character might never be seen again.

Spider-Man

If there is anybody who feels like he should be safe, it's Spider-Man.

As part of a franchise that is co-managed with another movie studio, it would be a hell of a piece of sleight of hand if Marvel were to somehow convince Sony to let them kill Spider-Man before the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming even got off the ground.

Doubly so, since doing so would necessitate the third major reimagining of the Spider-Man movie universe in less than ten years. That seems...excessive.

Black Panther

Just a few months after shattering every solo-superhero movie record in the Marvel Universe, you can bet money that the studio would not be keen to kill off Black Panther or the women of Wakanda, even if there wasn't already a sequel in the works.

But there is, which seemingly gives us the closest thing you can get to a guarantee on these kinds of things.

Even killing of Okoye or Shuri, which theoretically would not queer the possibility of future Black Panther movies, feels extremely unlikely given how popular those characters were and how little screen time they have had so far. Getting rid of them now would leave a lot of fertile area unexplored.

The Guardians of the Galaxy

While not every Guardian is guaranteed to live, the most likely scenario is that all or most of them will, with a third film coming up that will round out James Gunn's trilogy.

While Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 took place out of sync with the rest of the Marvel timeline, the third film will find the team catching up to the current MCU, and will take place following the events of the third and fourth Avengers movies, in which the Guardians characters also appear.

While Gunn clarified on Twitter today that this does not mean all of the characters survive, it is unlikely that many of the "core" team will perish. Star-Lord and Gamora, for instance, seem likely to survive so that their whole "unspoken thing" can be resolved in the finale to their own story, rather than being abruptly cut short after so much build-up in the last Guardians.

Characters like Drax the Destroyer and Nebula, who have little to lose and whose entire raison d'etre centers on killing Thanos, might seem like solid candidates for a death in the same story that takes Thanos out...but if the comics are any indication, at least Nebula will play a larger role as the story winds down.

Doctor Strange

(Photo: EW)

This one...well, we are slightly less secure in.

Still, Doctor Strange has not made that many appearances, the villain teased as the end of the first movie has not yet been seen, and a sequel has been announced -- even if star Benedict Cumberbatch seems a little clueless as to what the deal is with it.

"Not at the moment, no. The masterplan is continually in flux, so it would be out of order for me to speculate," said Cumberbatch during a recent interview, which simultaneously confirmed that it is still in development and will likely send certain fans into speculative fury.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Another instance where two Avengers are fairly safe because their names are the title of a movie coming out after Avengers: Infinity War does, Ant-Man and The Wasp is also protected by the fact that while at least some of these movies (Black Panther, Guardians) could theoretically go back in time if that is what the studio needed them to do, this one would not really work that way.

Why? Their origin story was the last film, and as far as we can tell, everything in the trailer for the sequel takes place after the events of Ant-Man.

Black Widow

After years of being back-burnered as a solo movie franchise, much to the chagrin of impatient fans, a Black Widow movie starring Scarlett Johansson was finally announced last year...just in time to seemingly guarantee her survival.

Because Avengers: Infinity War marks the end of several contracts for the earliest Marvel characters, it is possible that with a solo movie in the offing, Black Widow is the only original Avenger essentially guaranteed survival in the film.

...Y'know. As long as her movie doesn't turn out to be a prequel or something.

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