Can Captain Marvel's Skrulls come back after Thanos & Avengers: Endgame?

Captain wonder presents the long-awaited debut of Carol Danvers; Nick Fury, two eyes at once spectacular and aged; and a cat named Goose that everyone could not help loving. It also presents the very first appearance of an extraterrestrial race known as Skrulls, one of the most famous cosmic threats of Marvel.

The Skrulls have been poking comic fans into trouble since the early 1960s with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's The four fantastics It is a metamorphosed race of invaders that infiltrates and destabilizes all planets by disguising themselves as friends and enemies, turning their allies against each other. They have been the central antagonist of countless stories of events, sowing paranoia and fear in the Marvel Universe, a stolen identity at a time.

But now that they have finally landed, Captain Marvel, We wonder: can these new Skrulls be the all-new big players in Marvel Universe that we have been waiting for?

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Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

A crisis of Skrull's identity

Captain Marvel cast the gauntlet with a complete overhaul of the Skrull's lifestyle for the big screen, turning them from devious and deadly invaders into cosmic refugees and victims of violent and genocidal Kree. The Skrulls and Kree have been at war for ages in comics, and the dividing line between "good" and "bad" is rarely clearly drawn between them. But in the MCU, the Skrulls turn out to be downright sympathetic, looking for a new home for their families and children rather than any kind of megalomaniac interplanetary rule.

Captain MarvelThe update of Skrull's moral compass is not entirely new; The Marvel comics have a rich history of heroic skrulls – or at least morally gray – on which to lean. But they have never been the victims so clearly before. Talos and his family are not interested in invading the Earth at all. They prefer to get rid of Dodge completely anyway than to cause problems to anyone, a goal that Carol is more than willing to help help them achieve their goals.

So, are the Skrulls good now? That's all?

It certainly seems like that! Even if we do not We agree with Carol's choice to help them, we must recognize that it would not make sense for Talos and his company to escape the Earth before returning, more than fifteen years later, to take control.

That does not mean that there can be more Skrulls hiding as humans on Earth do not have Escape with Talos and Carol. But the prospect of a large-scale invasion plot, supported by double agents that existed under our noses since Iron Man seems much less likely. If there are always Skrulls around, the revelation of their identities would be less a hallucinating, overwhelming betrayal, but rather a revealing scent.

Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

So, what happens next?

There is a key dialogue line in Captain Marvel this could give way to an ugly turn of Skrull events somewhere on the line. Talos explains that there are "thousands of us separated from each other, scattered throughout the galaxy". An objective fact, but also a potential index.

With their civilization in ruins, it might be possible for a group of Skrulls somewhere out there to be still in the middle of the war. After all, escaping the Kree and finding a new home did not solve the problem as much as it temporarily mitigated. The Kree always have an endless appetite for zealous expansion and supremacist persecution. Thanks to Ronan's presence, the accuser Guardians of the Galaxywe know that the Kree Empire persists long after Carol's departure from Earth in 1995. And even though we do not see much in guardiansit does not seem like they had a major turnaround.

Thus, the possibility for another group of Skrull refugees to avenge their (quite legitimate) revenge on the Kree is on the table – which could put Carol, and perhaps even the Avengers, on their cross.

An open battle with Skrulls would always be a departure from the threat that the fans had anticipated, however. Skrull's stories are generally slow-burning conspiracies, loaded with paranoia, about who is really what they claim to be, rather than about more traditional alien science-fiction invasions.

And there is nothing wrong with the alien invasions of traditional sci-fi, but we now know that the MCU Skrulls may never be exactly what we thought – or exactly what they are in comics.

Marvel Studios

So who (or what) could play the role of Thanos after Avengers: Endgame?

While the imminent threat of a secret attack from Skrull is appeased, Marvel still has a sizeable list of other cosmic bad guys from which to tap for future phases of the MCU.

The first and most obvious replacement is the ruler, otherwise remembered as "these golden people of The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. "Ayesha and his almost identical crew of friends may have been largely a source of success for the Guardians, but the post-credit scene has highlighted some of the major developments, particularly with respect to potential entry. from Adam Warlock in the MCU.

The sovereign does not technically exist in the comics universe, at least not as such, but they borrow from a group of renegade scientists known as Enclave who were introduced in the late sixties. This would give the MCU an abundance of source material from which to skim without shudder, without having to be overly indebted to one particular incarnation, which would make it a pretty obvious candidate for the next big problem.

With the Fox / Disney fusion, the Shi'Ar, an alien race ready to debut on the big screen X Men: Dark Phoenix this summer – are also a distant possibility. They have long been banned for the MCU because of the same rights and licensing issues that kept the X-Men out of the MCU. But with the bold new frontier of Disney's acquisition of Fox, anything is possible. Depending on how things are going in Dark Phoenixthey could even be the perfect bridge between the X-Men franchise and the actual MCU somewhere on the line.

Another alien race that might come into play is the Builders, a relatively new addition to the Marvel Hall of Fame with a first appearance in 2013. Basically, it was a race of cosmic creatures that designed and organized all space and time , with the help of some other Extraterrestrial races they created called the Aleph, the gardeners, the guardians and the abyss.

If that sounds a bit exaggerated, do not worry, the Builders are responsible for creating entire worlds and, when the time comes, for their destruction, which became a problem when the Earth was put on the viewfinder. It would take a little work to properly translate them into the MCU, but if the next phase of the film was to find something bigger and meaner than the decimation of the entire universe by Thanos, the builders would be a big – if mind-bending – choice.

Interestingly, a major component of the Marvel 2014 program Infinite The Kree were also forced to team up with the Avengers to fight the builders. Infinite was the source of a significant amount of dressing for Avengers: war in the infinite, including the children of Thanos and the Outriders. A team of Kree-Avengers could possibly feel like a thematically organic stage after Captain Marvel – that is, assuming that there is even a team of Avengers to fight after End of Game.

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Meg Downey is an independent pop culture journalist specializing in superheroes and fan culture. She loves sidekicks, giant robots and the weird story of comics. When she's not trying desperately to meet deadlines, you can find her on Twitter. @rustypolishedwhere is she probably collapsing very publicly about something embarrassing.