SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for The Avengers: Age of Ultron. If you wish not to have any parts of the movie affected by knowledge going in, please click away to another one of our articles!
With the release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron in theaters this weekend, comic book movie fans everywhere are buzzing about the Infinity Stones. We know that these powerful ingots are going to play an incredibly important role in the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and slowly they are all coming to light. Now a new fan theory has entered the battlefield, however, suggesting that Marvel is layering some cute wordplay into their Infinity Stones reveal. Basically, the idea is that they are spelling out "THANOS."
This rather wild bit of speculation comes from ComicBook.com, and while it's a tad on the "stretch" side, let's investigate it anyway. According to the theory, each stone revealed so far can be linked with a corresponding letter based on where it was found/what it is. The rundown is as follows:
- T is for Tesseract, which is the blue cube found by Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger, and stolen/utilized by Loki in The Avengers. This is also known as the Space Stone.
- H is... unknown. This theory suggests that this space may ultimately be taken by either the Soul Stone or the Time Stone - the only two stones that have not yet been revealed.
- A is for Aether, which was introduced in Thor: The Dark World when Malekith tried to use it to black out the universe. This is also known as the Reality Stone.
- N... see the explanation for H
- O is for Orb, which is the Power Stone found in Guardians of the Galaxy and pursued by Star-Lord, Thanos, and Ronan The Accuser.
- S is for Scepter, which it is revealed in The Avengers: Age of Ultron contains the Mind Stone.
There are a couple reasons why this theory seems rather flimsy. Part of it is the fact that a third of the letters are still missing, and that's a big enough piece of the puzzle to put the whole thing on shaky ground. The other part of it is the fact that some of it very much feels like a stretch - particularly "S is for Scepter." All of the other explained letters actually describe what the respective stone is actually referred to as in their respective movies, but Loki's Scepter was merely the conveyance rather than the actual stone.
Truthfully, the only reason I'm willing to give this a second thought is because of the fact that Marvel really does love to stick in these kinds of fun Easter Eggs. You may remember just a few weeks ago when we reported that all of the movies in Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have a character getting a hand/arm cut off as a tribute to Star Wars. They like to have fun, and this isn't necessarily something that would be outside of their alley.
Do you think there's any validity to this theory? Hit the comments with your thoughts.
