Warning: This article contains huge spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.
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So, that Avengers: Infinity War ending, eh?
The word 'bold' immediately comes to mind, followed by a sentence: "How the hell are they going to come back from this?" There's a year to wait before we get the follow-up in the untitled Avengers 4 movie. But how can they possibly resolve the terrible mess that Thanos has made?
This is your final warning. We're hitting the spoilers hard from here.
So, Thanos acquired the six Infinity Stones, and with a snap of his gauntleted fingers erased half of the life in the universe. That included a bevy of heroes – The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel), Drax (Dave Bautista) and Star-Lord (Chris Pratt).
There's just no way they will all stay dead. Spider-Man has the Homecoming sequel kicking off Marvel Studios' Phase Four, and Black Panther and Doctor Strange are prime candidates for solo movie sequels. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 has also been announced, and as it stands would be a team-up between Rocket and Nebula.
But how can they bring back the lost heroes?
Time travel
Rumours of a time-travel storyline for Avengers 4 have been kicking around for some time – long before we realised why our heroes might want to head back in time to alter events. The theory was based on the fact that various actors have been spotted on set in their Phase One costumes – including Chris Hemsworth holding Mjolnir and back in his long, blonde wig.
But how could our heroes travel through time? The obvious choice would be the Time Stone, which is inconveniently in the hands (hand?) of Thanos. Will they have to go up against him to get it, or could there be an alternate method of travelling back in time that we're unaware of?
It's also worth mentioning that fans had begun to question the time-travel idea, with an alternate theory that the retro Avengers were a creation of Tony Stark's BARF technology (the Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing that allowed him to revisit his memories of his parents in Captain America: Civil War). Now we know how Infinity War finished, that looks less likely than time-travel – unless the surviving heroes are searching for a solution in their memories, perhaps...
The Soul Stone
The Soul Stone didn't do very much in Infinity War (except cost Gamora her life), so we don't know how it's supposed to work. But in the comics, its power is to manipulate and collect souls, which it can store in a 'pocket dimension' called Soul World inside the stone. That might be the place at the end of the movie in which Thanos sees the young Gamora again.
We have a theory that he isn't really the possessor of the Soul Stone. The Red Skull says that you have to sacrifice the person you love the most in order to claim the stone, but that's a paradox, right? If you really love someone, you can't kill them for a bloody stone!
Perhaps Gamora survived inside the Soul Stone, and is the true controller of its power. And she might have preserved all the people Thanos 'killed' at the end of Infinity War inside the stone with her. So the solution to restoring everyone to life might lie with the Soul Stone – which will also demand another tussle with Thanos.
Captain Marvel
Infinity War ends with Nick Fury sending a distress call to Captain Marvel (as revealed when her star logo appears on his pager). Could she offer the solution to their problems?
We're still not clear on how her standard power set (think Superman with extra energy blasts) could directly solve the problem the Avengers and Guardians find themselves in. It's not clear that Fury knew the details about what had been going on with Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet. So why was he only calling on her now?
Whatever the case, Marvel's most powerful hero will almost certainly have a big part to play in Avengers 4. (Given that her upcoming standalone is set in the '90s, it certainly reinforces the time-travel idea.)
The Quantum Realm
First introduced in Ant-Man, the microscopic Quantum Realm is an other-dimensional space with links to the weird realities that Doctor Strange later accessed in his own movies. There have been hints that it will have a bigger part to play in the future – and also that it could feature in the Captain Marvel solo movie.
We know very little about the Quantum Realm at the moment, but expect to learn more in the next MCU movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp. Perhaps it will offer some surprising way to restore all those dead people.
Doctor Strange's long play
Before giving up the Time Stone and ultimately fading away with half the universe, Doctor Strange peers into the future and says that he has found one way to defeat Thanos out of millions. Now, we're pretty sure that this 'victory' wasn't that Thanos would just defeat them and win.
So what did he see? We don't know, but we bet it involves a way out for our beleaguered superheroes.
Avengers: Infinity War is out now. Book tickets here.
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