1) Stan Lee Is The Watcher
Back in the 1960’s, comic book extraordinaire Stan Lee created Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor, Daredevil, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and presumably every other literary character ever written. Once superhero movies became big business, Fox, Marvel and Sony all began to give the legendary writer cameos in the majority of their comic book films, even for characters he didn’t have a hand in creating.
From a security guard and a truck driver to an alien playboy, Stan the Man has appeared as a huge number of characters spanning different settings and even different time periods. Most take these appearances at face value, assuming that the films are simply giving fans of the comics a cheeky nudge and a wink, but one popular fan theory suggests that each cameo is part of something far greater…
In the comics, everything that happens on Earth is observed by an alien entity known as Uatu, the Watcher, who occasionally intervenes in mortal affairs, even when it goes against his code. Many people believe that Stan Lee has been secretly cast in this role, explaining why his characters always pop up in close proximity to Marvel’s heroes and why he looks the same in every film.
Lee’s cameos span across films from different studios, so if the theory is true, this would imply that all of Marvel’s, Fox’s and Sony’s superhero movies are in fact linked somehow. In the Marvel comics, there are alternate dimensions that the characters occasionally travel through, as seen most recently in the new Secret Wars crossover, so the Watcher’s omnipresence isn’t completely out of the question.
Maybe one day Fox and Marvel will finally learn to play nicely together and give fans the shared MCU that we’ve always dreamed of.