The titular alien superhero team of The Eternals haven’t explicitly appeared in the MCU before now, but given their immortal lifespans and backstory that reaches back to the ancient times of the Marvel universe, there’s the potential to revisit past movies and find connections to them that proves the Eternals have always been around. For instance, maybe we actually saw the origins of the species way back in Guardians of the Galaxy and didn’t notice?
This intriguing theory comes from ComicBook.com, based on an eyebrow-raising piece of artwork that leaked online this weekend. The blurry image showcases Richard Madden’s Ikaris with a glowing fist, with the power highly reminiscent of Captain Marvel’s binary mode (see it in the gallery below). Given that Carol Danvers got her abilities from the Tesseract AKA the Space Stone, we’re left to wonder whether Ikaris has come into contact with the artifact in the past.
CB suggests, though, that it’s possible Ikaris himself hasn’t encountered the Tesseract but rather, his ancestors did. We know that the Celestials created the Eternals by experimenting on ancient humans, so what if their experiments involved the Infinity Stones?
Now, here’s where Guardians comes in. The Collector explains in that movie that the Power Stone was previously wielded by Eson the Searcher, a Celestial, who used it to destroy worlds.
It later fell into the hands of a group of individuals who failed to survive its power. What if these individuals were Eternals, then, and this was not a voluntary action but part of the Celestials’ experiments to create super-humans? Perhaps this very explosion caused by the deaths of this group resulted in a colossal release of energy that served as the event that created the entire Eternals race.
As ComicBook.com explains:
After the Guardians take the Power Stone to The Collector (Benicio del Toro), the latter gives the team — and all of MCU fandom, for that matter — a rundown on Infinity Stones, how they were created, and what they do. In the examples The Collector uses, we see Eson the Searcher razing a planet of an alien life form. Immediately thereafter, we see a group of eight individuals harnessing the stones before disintegrating as The Collector explains they were, in fact, able to hold the items for a moment. Therein lies the first appearance of the Eternals in the MCU.
The Eternals is likely to clarify the species’ origins when it arrives this November. Until, then, though, this is a convincing theory that would offer a brilliant bit of MCU interconnectivity if it ends up being canon.