Since Iron Man first debuted in 2008, the team at Marvel Studios has been able to craft an intricately-woven universe full of franchises, characters, MacGuffins, and the works. There have been times a character’s popped up on-screen in a cameo role only to appear again at some point in a later date — see Peter Billingsley in both Iron Man and Spider-Man: Far From Home. It’s because of that, there’s a distinct possibility we’ve already seen the Eternals on-screen at one point or another.
Let’s break it down a little bit further, shall we? Earlier this weekend, alleged promo art started circulating online showing Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Ajak (Salma Hayek) in slightly updated looks over the costumes we initially saw at D23. In the Ikaris still, the character is seen with a glowing hand, not unlike the visual effects used when Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) goes binary in other MCU movies.
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Using that logic, we’re assuming Ikaris has come in contact with the Tesseract at one point or another, the same device — the same Infinity Stone — that once gave Carol Danvers her Earth-shattering powers. The question then would be when this incident took place. For that, we have to look back to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
After the Guardians take the Power Stone to The Collector (Benicio del Toro), the latter gives the team — and all of MCU fandom, for that matter — a rundown on Infinity Stones, how they were created, and what they do. In the examples The Collector uses, we see Eson the Searcher razing a planet of an alien life form. Immediately thereafter, we see a group of eight individuals harnessing the stones before disintegrating as The Collector explains they were, in fact, able to hold the items for a moment. Therein lies the first appearance of the Eternals in the MCU.
But why was that group holding the Stones? There would be two trains of thought spinning off that — they either did it willingly, say after finding them on Earth after the Celestials left, or if they did it unwillingly. In the latter scenario, it stands to reason the Celestials used the items to do their experimentations on the group — something that could have given them their powers. If that’s the case, that moment we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy could serve as the cataclysm that served as the beginning of the Eternals race. If Ikaris didn’t come into direct contact with the Tesseract/Space Stone himself, perhaps one of his ancestors was included in that one Guardians shot and it was passed down genetically.
After all, we’ve seen Celestials are willing to kill entire civilizations using the Stones, why wouldn’t they use them to play God and come up with their own superior race?
The Eternals hit theaters November 6th.
Other upcoming Marvel Studios movies include Black Widow on May 1, 2020, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on February 12, 2021, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on May 7, 2021, Spider-Man 3 on July 16, 2021, Thor: Love and Thunder on November 5, 2021, and Black Panther 2 on May 6, 2022.
