We’ve known that Captain Marvel will finally introduce The Skrulls to the MCU, but her origin movie won’t be the only time we see them in 2019 (and I’m not talking about Dark Phoenix). A new rumor has surfaced that says the green shape shifting aliens will also play a very small role in Avengers 4 next May.

Before someone freaks out and thinks that Avengers 4‘s title is “Secret Invasion”, I said a very small role. They aren’t the primary villains in the movie, that’s still Thanos. But it sounds like Avengers 4, with Captain Marvel before it, may begin to lay the hints and groundwork to build towards a Secret Invasion later in Phase 4.

The rumor goes like this. In the post-credits scene of Avengers: Infinity War, Nick Fury and Maria Hill are tracking the extraterrestrial signals being detected in Wakanda. Now neither Fury nor Hill knows about Thanos coming to Earth. But Fury does know about another extraterrestrial threat in the Skrulls due to him being around Carol Danvers in the 90s when she was dealing with them. That’s why he sends the signal to Captain Marvel, because he believed the Skrulls were finally invading Earth.

This then ties into Avengers 4 and Hawkeye’s role in the story. The rumor is that he’s working as Ronin in Tokyo and hunting down Yakuza, who are actually Skrulls. The casting notice for these extras apparently said they needed to be comfortable wearing a facial prosthetic, which would definitely point to them being Skrulls if true.

There’s also a comic book precedent for this. The original Infinity Gauntlet comic wasn’t too long after the famous Kree-Skrull war, and after The Snap in the comic; the two races immediately went back to war because they each thought the other side was responsible for half of their population vanishing.

We’re going to see the Kree and Skrulls in Captain Marvel, which again is set in the 90s, and it’s possible they are in the middle of their famous war in that movie. The actions of Thanos twenty years later, wiping out half the population of the universe, would leave the Earth very vulnerable to the Skrulls.

Again, it’s not Secret Invasion yet, but it’s the first steps towards what could become a MCU adaptation of that comic. And Marvel is even publishing a Secret Invasion omnibus this fall, so they want people to be familiar with the concept…

About Author Jeremy Conrad https://mcucosmic.com/ Jeremy has been active on the web since the 90s. He once ran IGN DVD as well as other sites, and worked in the video game industry on Star Wars Galaxies. When he’s not pursing the future of Marvel movies, he’s really into tech. See author's posts