As the heart and soul of both Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America fully deserved the happy ending he received at the end of Avengers: Endgame. A lot of fans were worried that Steve Rogers wasn’t going to make it out of the movie alive, but despite one of the franchise’s other marquee names biting the dust, Cap survived and got to spend a lifetime with Peggy Carter.
With the star-spangled superhero traveling back through history to return the Infinity Stones to their rightful places in both time and space, there’s been plenty of theories thrown out there about the sort of adventures he would have found himself caught up in, a story that Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo admitted they’d love to see get told on the screen one day.
One of the things people immediately picked up on was that to return the Soul Stone to Vormir, Captain America would have ended up crossing paths with his arch-nemesis the Red Skull for the first time since World War II. Hawkeye presumably had no idea who the mysterious figure guarding the trinket was, meaning Cap would be completely unaware that Johann Schmidt was still out there.
The Russos also confirmed that the accidental reunion did happen off-screen, and some new fan art from Camille Vialet captures the look you’d imagine Red Skull would have on his face pretty accurately. See for yourself below:
Having been exiled on Vormir since the end of World War II, Red Skull managed to get rid of the Soul Stone twice and still couldn’t escape his fate thanks to Avengers: Endgame‘s time-traveling shenanigans, and it no doubt would have only added insult to injury for him to encounter his mortal enemy for the first time in nearly 80 years completely out of the blue and simply have it handed back to him.
